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János Bolyai (1802 – 1860) was a Hungarian mathematician, and one of the founders of
non-Euclidean geometry – a geometry in which Euclid’s fifth axiom about parallel lines does
not hold. This was a significant breakthrough in mathematics. Unfortunately for Bolyai, the
mathematicians Gauss and Lobachevsky discovered similar results at the same time, and
received most of the credit.
Non-Euclidean Geometry

This article is from an old version of Mathigon and will be updated soon.

The Hunter and the Bear

A hunter is tracking a bear. Starting at his camp, he walks one mile due south. Then the bear
changes direction and the hunter follows it due east. After one mile, the hunter loses the bear’s
track. He turns north and walks for another mile, at which point he arrives back at his camp. What
was the colour of the bear?

There are multiple places on Earth where this could happen, but only one where you can find
bears…
An odd question – not only is the colour of the bear unrelated to the rest of the question, but how
can the hunter walk south, east and north, and then arrive back at his camp? This certainly doesn’t
work everywhere on Earth, but it does if you start at the North pole. And therefore the colour of the
bear has to be white.

A surprising observation is that the triangle seems to have two right angles – in the two bottom
corners. Therefore the sum of all three angles is greater than 180°, something that we proved to be
impossible.

All these things are based on the fact that geometry works differently in flat space than it does on
curved surfaces like a sphere. There are many other kinds of geometry, different kinds of space,
with different properties. In this article we will explore a few of them.

Metric Spaces
One of the most fundamental concepts in geometry is that of distance. Intuitively, the distance
between two points is the length of the straight line which connects them. There are no straight lines
on the surface of a sphere, but even on a flat surface we can find a number of different ways to
define the meaning of distance:

EUCLIDEAN METRIC MANHATTAN METRIC BRITISH RAIL METRIC

We can define the distance between two points in space, like above, but we can also define the
distance between other objects. For example, the distance between two images could tell you about
their similarity: if the images are similar their distance is small, and if they look very different their
distance is large. The distance between two human beings could tell you about how closely they are
related.

We need some more information to accurately describe these two new “distance functions”, but
there are three properties which all distance functions must have in common:

 The distance between a point and itself is zero, and the distance between two distinct points is
never zero.

The distance between points A and B is the same as the distance between points B and A.
 The direct distance between points A and C is always at least as small as the distance between
points A and B plus the distance between points B and C. This is called the Triangle Inequality.
The various “distance functions” are called Metrics, and the corresponding “spaces” are
called Metric Spaces. There are many other distance functions, similar to the ones above.

MORE ON THE MANHATTAN METRIC

Spherical Geometry

In the introduction we discovered that we can draw a triangle on the surface of a sphere in which
the angles add up to more than 180°. The amount by which the sum of the angles in a spherical
triangle exceeds 180° depends on the size of a triangle compared to the size of the entire sphere.
Large triangles have a greater sum of angles than small triangles.

This is only one of the facts which distinguish geometry on flat surfaces (Euclidean geometry)
from spherical geometry.

Even drawing a “straight” line between two points on the surface of a sphere is problematic. There
are many different possibilities, but the shortest line lies on an imaginary “equator” through the two
points. These equators are called great circles and the great circle segments, called geodesics,
are what we mean when we refer to “lines” in the following section.

EUCLIDEAN GEOMETRY SPHERICAL GEOMETRY

LINES BETWEEN
TWO POINTS
On a flat surface, there is a
unique straight line between
two points. On a sphere, there
are at least two lines/geodesics
between distinct points, and
infinitely many lines between
opposite points on the sphere.

2-GONS
On a flat surface, you can’t
have polygons with only two
sides (2-gons), but you can on
a sphere.
 RIGHT ANGLES
Triangles in a flat surface can
have at most one right angle.
Triangles on a sphere can have
two or even three right angles.

Spherical geometry is much harder to visualise than flat Euclidean geometry, but we do live on a
sphere rather than a disk. Since Earth is so large compared to us, the effects of spherical geometry
are hardly noticeable in everyday life and the surface looks almost flat at any one point. But
understanding spherical geometry is important for navigation and cartography, as well as astronomy
and calculating satellite orbits.

Projections
The most common problem with living on a sphere arises when designing maps – it is impossible to
accurately represent the 3-dimensional surface of Earth on 2-dimensional paper.

By “stretching” the surface in various ways, it is possible to create projections of Earth’s surface
onto a plane. However some of the geographical properties, such as area, shape, distance or
direction, will get distorted.

The Mercator Projection The Gall-Peters Projection The Mollweide Projection

The Mercator projection significantly distorts the relative size of various countries, while the Gall-
Peters and Mollweide projections distort straight lines and bearings. There are many other
projections to represent Earth on maps, and you often use different projections to show certain
parts of Earth, or for particular applications such as nautical navigation.

The underlying reason for having to distort Earth’s surface in order to represent it on a 2-
dimensional map is the fact that it has a positive curvature. Only shapes with a zero curvature,
such as cubes, cylinders or cones, can be represented in a lower dimension without distortion.

The curvature of a curve at a particular point is the inverse of the radius of the circle which best
approximated the curve at that point. For a straight line, this would be a circle with infinite radius, so
the curvature is 1/∞ = 0. For points on a 2-dimensional surface, you can find many different
curvatures along different directions. The principle curvature is the product of the smallest and the
largest of these curvatures. Points with a positive curvature are called elliptic points. Points with a
negative or zero curvature are called hyperbolic or parabolic points respectively.

Hyperbolic Geometry

The surface of a sphere is curved “inwards” (a positive curvature). Instead we could think about
what happens if space is curved “outwards” at every point (a negative curvature), forming a surface
which looks like a saddle. This gives rise to Hyperbolic Geometry.

Spherical triangle Euclidean triangle Hyperbolic triangle

Hyperbolic surfaces appear in nature and technology, usually because of their large surface area or
because of their physical strength:

Hyperbolic cooling towers at power Hyperbolic corals Hyperbolic flower vase

Unlike the surface of a sphere, hyperbolic space is infinite. However we can create a finite
projection of hyperbolic space onto a flat surface:
A hyperbolic tiling consisting of triangles Circle Limit III by M. C. Escher (1898 – 1972)

These projections are called Poincaré disks, named after the French mathematician Henri Poincaré
(1854 – 1912). In hyperbolic space all the triangles (left) would have “straight” edges as well as the
same size and shape. In the projection, space is distorted in a way that makes triangles towards the
centre look bigger and triangles towards the edge look much smaller. There are infinitely many of
these triangles, forming an infinite regular tessellation in hyperbolic space.

Background:

Click anywhere inside the disk to add a point. Create a second point to form a hyperbolic line. Once placed, you can change the lines
by dragging the endpoints. While the lines may appear curved in the Poincaré disk projection, they are straight in hyperbolic space.
Can you make hyperbolic triangles, squares or other shapes?

Special Relativity asserts that, depending on how fast you are moving, time runs faster or slower
and distances appear longer or shorter. These effects are only noticeable if you move
very, very fast – but they are important to consider for example when designing satellite navigation
systems.

One way to model the distortions of space and time predicted by special relativity is to think about
space and time as being hyperbolic rather than “flat” and Euclidean. Hyperbolic geometry can be
used to add velocities and calculate the effect of accelerations.

Higher Dimensions
COMING SOON

Topology
When defining Metric spaces at the beginning of this chapter, the key concept was that of distance.
In contrast, in Topology we don’t care about the distance between two points, only whether it
is possible to move from one point to the other. Two objects are topologically equivalent,
or homeomorphic if we can transform one into the other by continuously bending and stretching it,
without having to cut holes or glue boundaries together.

Many letters in the alphabet are topologically equivalent. Imagine they are made of rubber and can
be easily stretched, but not cut or glued together.

Similarly, a teacup and a doughnut are topologically equivalent and can be transformed into each
other – the subject of many jokes about topologists. The mathematical name for doughnut shapes
is torus.

On the other hand, a torus and a sphere are not equivalent because one has a hole and the other
one doesn’t. They have different topological properties: for example, any “rubber loop” embedded
on the surface of a sphere can be compressed to almost a point. On the surface of a torus, there
are some rubber loops which can’t be compressed in that way:
Henri Poincaré (1854 – 1912)

In three dimensions, it is intuitively clear that any shape on which you can condense all rubber
bands to a point has to be homeomorphic to a sphere. Henri Poincaré conjectured that the same is
true for spheres in 4-dimensional space: the Poincaré Conjecture. For more than 100 years, this
was one of the most important unsolved problems in mathematics, including one of the
seven Millennium Prize Problems with a prize money of $1,000,000.

In 2002, the conjecture was proven by the Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman (*1966) using a
concept called the Ricci Flow. It is the only Millennium problem that has been solved to date – but
Perelman declined both the prize money and the Fields Medal, the most prestigious award in
mathematics.

Möbius Strip and Klein Bottle