A deftly told tale of the 19th-century geniuses who solved the world's oldest unsolved math problem, sparking a disruptive scientific revolution
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. What happened when three 19th-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 moment that the tangible and easily understood world we live in gave way to the strange, mind-blowing world of relativity, curved space, and more.
Jason Socrates Bardi (College Park, MD) is the author of The Calculus Wars (978-1-56025-992-3).