The Fifth Postulate: How Unraveling a Two Thousand Year Old Mystery Unraveled the Universe
Author:   Jason Socrates Bardi
Publisher:   Turner Publishing Company
ISBN:  

9780470149096


Pages:   272
Publication Date:   18 December 2008
Format:   Hardback
Availability:   In Print   Availability explained
Limited stock is available. It will be ordered for you and shipped pending supplier's limited stock.

Our Price $73.79 Quantity:  
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The Fifth Postulate: How Unraveling a Two Thousand Year Old Mystery Unraveled the Universe


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Overview

This is a deftly told tale of the 19th-century geniuses who solved the world's oldest unsolved math problem, sparking a disruptive scientific revolution. Euclidean geometry has been profoundly influential for centuries, but its Fifth Postulate (which asserts that two parallel lines will never intersect) eluded all attempts to prove it. What happened when three 19th-century mathematicians realized that there was 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 that the tangible and easily understood world we live in gave way to the strange, mind-blowing world of relativity, curved space, and more. Jason Socrates Bardi (College Park, MD) is the author of ""The Calculus Wars"" (978-1-56025-992-3).

Full Product Details

Author:   Jason Socrates Bardi
Publisher:   Turner Publishing Company
Imprint:   John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Dimensions:   Width: 15.50cm , Height: 3.00cm , Length: 23.60cm
Weight:   0.476kg
ISBN:  

9780470149096


ISBN 10:   0470149094
Pages:   272
Publication Date:   18 December 2008
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Out of Stock Indefinitely
Availability:   In Print   Availability explained
Limited stock is available. It will be ordered for you and shipped pending supplier's limited stock.

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.

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

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