HEARTCEL BABES F.

EYAS

ACTIVITY NO 2.1

Non-Euclidean geometry
wrote a commentary on The Elements where he comments on attempted
proofs to deduce the fifth postulate from the other four, in particular he notes
Proclus (410-485) that Ptolemy had produced a false 'proof'
Playfair's Axiom:- Given a line and a point not on the line, it is possible to draw
exactly one line through the given point parallel to the line.

wrote a famous commentary on Euclid in 1795 in which he proposed

John Playfair  (1795)
replacing Euclid's fifth postulate by this axiom.

he had deduced the fifth postulate

Wallis in 1663
To each triangle, there exists a similar triangle of arbitrary magnitude

Saccheri proved that the hypothesis of the obtuse angle implied the fifth
postulate, so obtaining a contradiction. Saccheri then studied the hypothesis
of the acute angle and derived many theorems of non-Euclidean geometry
Girolamo Saccheri
without realising what he was doing. However he eventually 'proved' that the
hypothesis of the acute angle led to a contradiction by assuming that there is a
'point at infinity' which lies on a plane.

Lambert noticed that, in this new geometry, the angle sum of a triangle

Lambert 1766
increased as the area of the triangle decreased.

proved that Euclid's fifth postulate is equivalent to the sum of the angles of a

Legendre
triangle is equal to two right angles

Elementary geometry was by this time engulfed in the problems of the parallel
D'Alembert 1767
postulate. It was called it the scandal of elementary geometry.
Gauss 1792 The first person to really come to understand the problem of the parallels
Farkas Bolyai made several false proofs of the parallel postulate

all written down and he published his strange new world as a 24 page

appendix to his father's book
János Bolyai1823
followed the consequences in a not too dissimilar fashion from those who had
chosen to assume the fifth postulate was false and seek a contradiction.

ublished a work on non-Euclidean geometry 

He published Geometrical investigations on the theory of
parallels in 1840 which, in its 61 pages, gives the clearest account
of Lobachevsky's work.
Lobachevsky 1829 In Lobachevsky's 1840 booklet he explains clearly how his non-Euclidean
geometry works.
All straight lines which in a plane go out from a point can, with reference to a
given straight line in the same plane, be divided into two classes - into cutting
and non-cutting. The boundary lines of the one and the other class of those
lines will be called parallel to the given line.

he reformulated the whole concept of geometry which he saw as a space with

Riemann 1854
enough extra structure to be able to measure things like length.

In 1868 he wrote a paper Essay on the interpretation of non-Euclidean

geometry which produced a model for 2-dimensional non-Euclidean geometry
Eugenio Beltrami (1835-
within 3-dimensional Euclidean geometry. The model was obtained on the
1900)
surface of revolution of a tractrix about its asymptote. This is sometimes called
a pseudo-sphere.

gave models of other non-Euclidean geometries such as Riemann's spherical

geometry. Klein's work was based on a notion of distance defined
Klein in 1871 by Cayley in 1859 when he proposed a generalised definition for distance.