The Fifth Postulate: How Unraveling A Two Thousand Year Old Mystery Unraveled the Universe

by Jason Socrates Bardi

Overview

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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780470467367
Publisher:	Trade Paper Press
Publication date:	12/01/2008
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	932,189
File size:	380 KB

About the Author

Jason Socrates Bardi, author of The Calculus Wars, holds master's degrees in both science writing and molecular biophysics from Johns Hopkins University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments.

Prologue.

1 A Mathematician’s Waterloo.

2 The Strange Vegetarian Cult and Mathematics.

3 The Mystery Maker.

4 Those False and Would-Be Proofs.

5 A Codebreaker’s Fix.

6 Searching for Ceres.

7 The Dim Light of Exhaustion.

8 Gauss’s Little Secret.

9 Lessons of Curvature.

10 To Stir the Nests of Wasps.

11 A Strange New World.

12 A Message for You, Ambassador.

13 "To Praise It Would Be to Praise Myself."

14 The Birth of Electronic Communication.

15 The Imaginary Man from Kazan.

16 The Soul of the Universe.

17 The Curvature of Space.

Notes.

Bibliography.

Index.