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The real world

in geometry in

History of geometry

Written by
J.L. Heilbron
Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, England. Author of Geometry Civilized and The Sun in the Church among others.
J.L. Heilbron
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Britannica Editors
Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree....
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‱History

Euclid’s Elements had claimed the excellence of being a true account of space. Within this interpretation, Euclid’s fifth postulate was an empirical finding; non-Euclidean geometries did not apply to the real world. Bolyai apparently could not free himself from the persuasion that Euclidean geometry represented reality. Lobachevsky observed that, if there were a star so distant that its parallax was not observable from the Earth’s orbit, his geometry would be indistinguishable from Euclid’s at the point where the parallax vanished. By his calculation, based on stellar parallaxes then just detected, his geometry could be physically meaningful only in gargantuan triangles spanning interstellar space.

In fact, non-Euclidean geometries apply to the cosmos more locally than Lobachevsky imagined. In 1916 Albert Einstein (1879–1955) published “The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity,” which replaced Newton’s description of gravitation as a force that attracts distant masses to each other through Euclidean space with a principle of least effort, or shortest (temporal) path, for motion along the geodesics of a curved space. Einstein not only explained how gravitating bodies give this surface its properties—that is, mass determines how the differential distances, or curvatures, in Riemann’s geometry differ from those in Euclidean space—but also successfully predicted the deflection of light, which has no mass, in the vicinity of a star or other massive body. This was an extravagant piece of geometrizing—the replacement of gravitational force by the curvature of a surface. But it was not all. In relativity theory time is considered to be a dimension along with the three dimensions of space. On the closed four-dimensional world thus formed, the history of the universe stands revealed as describable by motion within a vast congeries of geodesics in a non-Euclidean universe.

J.L. Heilbron