This is a popular book that chronicles the historical attempts to
prove the fifth postulate of Euclid on parallel lines that led
eventually to the creation of non-Euclidean geometry. To absorb the
mathematical content of the book, the reader should be familiar
with the foundations of Euclidean geometry at the high school
level. But besides the mathematics, the book is also devoted to
stories about the people, brilliant mathematicians starting from
Pythagoras and Euclid and terminating with Gauss, Lobachevsky and
Klein. For two thousand years, mathematicians tried to prove the
fifth postulate (whose formulation seemed to them too complicated
to be a real postulate and not a theorem, hence the title In the
Search for Beauty). But in the 19th century, they realized that
such proof was impossible, and this led to a revolution in
mathematics and then in physics. The two final chapters are devoted
to Einstein and his general relativity which revealed to us that
the geometry of the world we live in is not Euclidean.Also included
is an historical essay on Omar Khayyam, who was not only a poet,
but also a brilliant astronomer and mathematician.
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