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

Mode of access: World Wide Web