Marius Sophus Lie was born on 17th December, 1842 in Nordfjordeide, Norway. He first attended school in the town of Moss, which is a port in south-eastern Norway, on the eastern side of the Oslo Fjord. In 1857, he entered Nissen's Private Latin School in Christiania (the city which became Kristiania, then Oslo in 1925) . While at this school he decided to take up a military career, but his eyesight was not sufficiently good so he gave up the idea and entered University of Christiania. Lie wrote a short mathematical paper in 1869, which he published at his own expense. He wrote up a more detailed exposition, but the world of mathematics was too cautious to quickly accept Lie's revolutionary notions. The Academy of Science in Christiania was reluctant to publish his work, and at this stage Lie began to despair that he would become accepted in the mathematical world. His friend Motzfeldt did a superb job of encouraging Lie to press on with his mathematical ideas and the breakthrough came later in 1869 when Crelle's Journal accepted his paper.

In 1871, Lie became an assistant at Christiania, having obtained a scholarship, and he also taught at Nissen's Private Latin School in Christiania where he had been a pupil himself. He submitted a dissertation On a Class of Geometric Transformations (written in Norwegian) for his doctorate, which was duly awarded in July 1872. The dissertation contained ideas from his first results published in Crelle's Journal and also the work on contact transformations, a special case of these transformations being a transformation which maps a line into a sphere, which he had discovered while in Paris. It was clear that Lie was a remarkable mathematician and the University of Christiania reacted in a very positive way, creating a chair for him in 1872. It was during the winter of 1873-74 that Lie began to develop systematically what became his theory of continuous transformation groups, later called Lie Groups leaving behind his original intention of examining partial differential equations. He died of pernicious anaemia in February 1899.