Scientific Publishing In The Search For Beauty: Unravelling Non-Euclidean Geometry

Review The title In the Search for Beauty reflects not just a beauty of geometry (and mathematics in general) but also a beauty of creativity, intellectual challenge and intellectual courage. The author, Voldemar Smilga, produced these reflections in a form of dramatical story of the fifth Euclidean postulate. The lively presentation of main characters makes it an interesting reading for everybody. --Arkady Vainshtein, University of MinnesotaSmilga not only offers a thorough account of the historical development of geometry from Euclid to Einstein, but does this in a very entertaining and enjoyable way. In his characteristic witty and engaged style, he describes the struggle of many outstanding mathematicians in Europe and in the Orient to grasp the significance of Euclid's fifth postulate. It is amazing to follow the ensuing intellectual fights. The zeal with which Lobachevsky""s resolution of the problem was rejected by some of his contemporaries, for instance, shows that it was not easy to distinguish facts from beliefs even before the invention of the internet ... I highly recommend the book it is a real pleasure to read. --Heinrich Leutwyler, Albert Einstein Center for Fundamental Physics, Universität BernThales, Pythagoras, Democritus, Plato, Aristotle, Omar Khayyam, St. Thomas d'Acquinas, Lobachevsky, Riemann and Einstein are just a few of the actors appearing in this engaging book. Smilga's book is a pleasant read on the history of the struggle with Euclid's fifth postulate, the emergence of non Euclidean geometry and its application in the theory of relativity. Highly recommended to anyone interested in the history of geometry and theory of relativity. --Seifallah Randjbar-Daemi, International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) Product Description 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.