Fifth Postulate How Unraveling a Two Thousand Year Old Mystery Unraveled the Universe

Name: Fifth Postulate How Unraveling a Two Thousand Year Old Mystery Unraveled the Universe
Price: 13.58 USD
Availability: InStock
ISBN: 9780470149096

ISBN-10: 0470149094

ISBN-13: 9780470149096

Edition: 2009

Authors: Jason Socrates Bardi

List price: $27.95

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Description:

Euclidean geometry has been profoundly influential for centuries, but its Fifth Postulate (which asserts that two parallel lines will never intersect) eluded all attempts to prove it for thousands of years. What happened when three nineteenth-century mathematicians realized that there was no way to prove the Fifth Postulate and that it ought to be discarded -- along with everything they'd come to "know" about geometry? Jason Socrates Bardi shares the dramatic story of the insight that set the stage for the non-Euclidian geometries that made the theory of relativity, string theory, black holes, and other scientific advances possible.

Book details

List price: $27.95
Copyright year: 2009
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Canada, Limited
Publication date: 12/1/2008
Binding: Hardcover
Pages: 272
Size: 6.10" wide x 9.30" long x 1.20" tall
Weight: 1.078
Language: English



Acknowledgments


Prologue



A Mathematician's Waterloo



The Strange Vegetarian Cult and Mathematics



The Mystery Maker



Those False and Would-Be Proofs



A Codebreaker's Fix



Searching for Ceres



The Dim Light of Exhaustion



Gauss's Little Secret



Lessons of Curvature



To Stir the Nests of Wasps



A Strange New World



A Message for You, Ambassador



"To Praise It Would Be to Praise Myself"



The Birth of Electronic Communication



The Imaginary Man from Kazan



The Soul of the Universe



The Curvature of Space


Notes


Bibliography


Index