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Jason Socrates Bardi tells the story of how the reluctant discovery of the strangely parallel, triumphant, and tragic lives of János Bolyai, Carl Friedrich Gauss, and Nikolai Lobachevsky came to the same profound conclusion. It examines a world of science in which the objective quest for new truth is inhibited by blind adherence to an old, unproven postulate, mainly because of fear that, if it were untrue, everything that was known about geometry, nature, and the universe itself would have to change.--[book jacket].
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Previews available in: English
Edition | Availability |
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1
Fifth Postulate: How Unraveling a Two Thousand Year Old Mystery Unraveled the Universe
2009, Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, John
in English
1282112767 9781282112766
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2
The fifth postulate: how unraveling a two thousand year old mystery unraveled the universe
2008, Wiley, John Wiley & Sons
in English
0470149094 9780470149096
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3
The Fifth Postulate
2008, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Electronic resource
in English
0470396121 9780470396124
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Book Details
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Includes bibliographical references and index.
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Work Description
The great discovery that no one wanted to make It's the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, and Euclidean geometry has been profoundly influential for centuries. One mystery remains, however: Euclid's fifth postulate has eluded for two thousand years all attempts to prove it. What happens when three nineteenth-century mathematicians realize that there is 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 when the tangible and easily understood world we live in gave way to the strange, mind-blowing world of relativity, curved space-time, and more. "Jason Socrates Bardi tells the story of the discovery of non-Euclidian geometry--one of the greatest intellectual advances of all time--with tremendous clarity and verve. I loved this book." --John Horgan, author, The End of Science and Rational Mysticism "An accessible and engrossing blend of micro-biography, history and mathematics, woven together to reveal a blockbuster discovery." --David Wolman, author of Righting the Mother Tongue and A Left-Hand Turn around the World
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