The Development of Non-Euclidean Geometry https://www.math.brown.edu/tbanchof/Beyond3d/chapter9/s...

The greatest mathematical thinker since the time of Newton was Karl Friedrich Gauss. In his
lifetime, he revolutionized many different areas of mathematics, including number theory, algebra,
and analysis, as well as geometry. Already as a young man, he had devised a construction for a 17-
sided regular polygon using only the traditional Euclidean tools, the straightedge and compass. His
most significant contributions to geometry came in his analysis of surfaces, and this analysis
played an important role in the understanding of non-Euclidean geometries.

Gauss was a surveyor, mapping out large areas of Europe, and he was an astronomer, studying
phenomena in the heavens. In his land-based job, he triangulated areas, dividing them up into
regions bounded by three of the shortest paths available on the surface of a sphere, namely great
circle arcs. In his astronomical endeavors, he again used triangles to estimate distances, but this
time the shortest paths available were the paths of light rays. In 1825 and again in 1827, Gauss
combined insights from these fields to develop two ways of organizing information about surfaces,
as intrinsic or extrinsic.

To appreciate the nature of the two approaches, he suggested a dimensional analogy--imagine

what kind of geometry would be experienced by flatworms, two-dimensional creatures constrained
to slide around oil a surface. Although we three-dimensional beings are bound by gravity to spend
most of our time moving along the surface of our planet, we can at least occasionally overcome
that superficial limitation, as when we dig or jump to avoid obstacles. But the flatworm, unable to
move up or down out of a surface, is virtually confined to a two-dimensional existence. How would
an intelligent flatworm describe the geometry of its universe? If the surface were a flat plane like
Flatland, the inhabitants would develop ordinary plane geometry, and as part of that geometry they
would discover that the sum of the angles of any triangle was 180 degrees. But what if they lived on
a very large sphere, so large that the curvature was not apparent to the creatures sliding along it? If
they measured a small triangle, the angle sum would be close to 180 degrees, but for large
triangles the results might be quite different. The geometry discovered by the flatworm would be
the geometry of a surface; this geometry depends only on those measurements made
along the surface.

The geometry of a surface depends on the way a surface sits in space, and that is the
geometry we would see in looking down upon the flatworm's universe. Guided somewhat by his
studies of astronomy, Gauss referred the geometry of the surface to the set of directions on the
celestial sphere. Each point of a smooth surface has a closest approximating plane, the tangent
plane. For each point on the surface, Gauss found a corresponding point on a unit sphere such that
the tangent planes at the two points were parallel. By this means, Gauss defined what he called the
spherical image mapping on a surface, one of the most powerful means of studying the way a
surface curves in space.

The most surprising and powerful theorems of Gauss are the ones that relate the intrinsic and the
extrinsic geometry of a surface. One of his biggest discoveries was that the extrinsic curvature
related to the Gauss mapping could be determined from the intrinsic geometry, just by making

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measurements along the surface. The flatworm surveyor could discover crucial facts about the
shape of its universe without ever leaving its superficial environment. Like ourselves, the flatworm
would be able to assign a distance to any path and to define the distance between two points as
the shortest length among all paths joining the points. Just as we measure angles between rays, it
could measure the angle between a pair of shortest curves emanating from a point, and it could
calculate the sum of the angles of a triangle just as we do. The flatworm's answer, however, might
be totally different from ours. If we start with three points on the flatworm's universe, we can take a
shortcut through space and connect them by straight line segments, and the angles of the triangle
we obtain will sum to 180 degrees. The flatworm, on the other hand, might claim that the sum of
the angles is not constant and that it depends on the size of the triangle.

Consider the particular case where the flatworm is confined to

the surface of a sphere. He could construct a large triangle on
the sphere running from the north pole to a point on the equator,
then one-quarter of the way around the equator, and back to the
north pole. Each of the angles of this spherical triangle is 90
degrees, so the angle sum is much greater than 180 degrees.
For us who can leave the surface of the sphere to connect the
points in space, the north pole and the two points on the
equator form an equilateral triangle with each angle 60 degrees.

The geometric study of the sphere has a very long history, but by
and large it was considered a subtopic in solid geometry. People
spoke about great circle arcs, and they even knew in some
A spherical triangle can have three
sense that these represented the shortest paths on the surface right angles beetween its pairs of
of the globe. But they did not think of them as the same sorts of great circle sides, even though the
objects as the segments that provided the shortest distances in triangle with straight sides determined
plane geometry. In ancient times, Ptolemy certainly knew that by the same vertices has angles of 60
degrees.
three great circle arcs forming a spherical triangle would
determine angles adding up to more than 180 degrees, and in fact he was able to prove that the
bigger the area of the triangle, the larger the angle sum. With proper choice of units this
relationship could be made explicit: the area of a triangular region on the sphere is precisely the
amount by which its angle sum exceeds 180 degrees. Why didn't Ptolemy realize that this was an
example of a non-Euclidean geometry, where the important Euclidean theorem that the angle sum
equals 180 degrees simply does not hold? The answer is that he did not think of the relationships
among points of a sphere and great circle arcs as a . To qualify as a geometry, a system
would have to have elements corresponding to points and lines, and the first four axioms would
have to be satisfied. The system consisting of points on a sphere and lines given by great circle
arcs did satisfy the third and fourth axiom, and even the second if we interpret it correctly, but it did
not satisfy the first axiom. Although two nearby points on the sphere determine a unique great
circle arc, there are point pairs for which this is not true. More than one great circle arc joins the
north and south poles, and in fact there are infinitely many half-circles of longitude joining these
two points, all of the same length. Thus spherical geometry did not qualify as a non-Euclidean
geometry, although later on in this chapter we will see that it was closely related to one.

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In the early part of the nineteenth century, mathematicians in three different parts of Europe found
non-Euclidean geometries--Gauss himself, Janós Bolyai in Hungary, and Nicolai Ivanovich
Lobachevski in Russia. Each of them realized that it was possible to construct a two-dimensional
geometry with points and shortest distance lines satisfying the first four axioms of Euclidean
geometry, but not the fifth. The parallel postulate required that for any given point not on a given
line, there is exactly one line through the point that does not meet the given line. There were two
ways for this postulate to fail--if every line through the point meets the given line, or if there were
two or more distinct lines through the point not meeting the line. The inventors of non-Euclidean
geometry found systems based on both alternatives to the fifth axiom.

The alternative axiom stating that there could be more than one
line through a given point not meeting a given line led to
. The theorems deduced bv Bolyai and
Lobachevski seemed quite strange, but they were as consistent
as Euclidean plane geometry. The diagrams that accompanied
The alternative to the fifth axiom in
their demonstrations certainly did not look like those in Euclid's
hyperbolic geometry posits that text, and mathematicians searched for some visual
through a point not on a given line, representation that could make the new geometry easier to
there are many lines not meeting the comprehend. One of the most successful expositors of this
given line.
geometry, in England as well as in his native Germany, was the
scientist Hermann von Helmholz. Appealing to the same thought experiment introduced by Gauss
he used the dimensional analogy to explain a way of imagining a non-Euclidean two-dimensional
geometry.

Helmholz asked his readers to consider a two-dimensional creature constrained to slide along the
surface of a piece of marble statuary, measuring lengths of curves and sizes of angles. For
example, a flatworm living on the surface of a cylindrical column would decide that for any region
bounded by three shortest distance curves the angle sum would be 180 degrees, just the way it is
on a plane, but if the column were in the shape of a long trumpet, the intrinsic geometry would be
very different. The surface he suggested was a , invented by the Italian geometer
Eugenio Beltrami. Although this surface had a sharp edge, it still illustrated most of the important
properties of hyperbolic geometry, a geometry satisfying the first four axioms, but not the fifth. For
any point and any shortest line, there were many lines through the point not meeting the line, and
every triangle on the surface had an angle sum strictly less than 180 degrees!

The alternative axiom that every line through a given point would meet any other line led to
. This case was reminiscent of the geometry of the sphere, where every two great circles
necessarily meet. The trouble with spherical geometry is that its straight lines meet twice. The
radical solution was to throw away half the points of the sphere and just use the points in the
southern hemisphere, below the equator. If the points of the southern hemisphere were the points
of the geometry, and great circle arcs were the lines, then any two points did determine a unique
line. The first axiom was saved. The third and fourth axioms still held, and the fifth certainly did not
since there were triangles in the southern hemisphere having angle sums greater than 180 degrees.

But there was a new problem--the second axiom failed because the great semicircles lying in the
southern hemisphere came to a dead stop when they reached the equator, and the second axiom

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requires that any line be indefinitely extendable. This difficulty was overcome by another radical
suggestion: in addition to the points of the southern hemisphere, use half of the points of the
equator, say those lying in the eastern hemisphere. When a point moving along a great circle arc in
the southern hemisphere reaches the equator, it jumps instantly to the opposite point on the
equator and continues to move along the great circle arc! In order for this procedure to work, we
must consider the point on the equator at the prime meridian, with 0 degrees longitude, to be the
same as the point on the international date line, with 180 degrees longitude. The amazing thing
was that this idea worked. Using half the points on the sphere, it was possible to construct a
geometry with great circle arcs as straight lines such that the sum of the angles of every triangle
was greater than 180 degrees.

In elliptical geometry, it is as if every pair of antipodal

points on the sphere represents the same point, and we
only pay attention to the one lying in the southern
hemisphere. The geometry is reminiscent of the
geometry of lines through the origin in three-space,
which we considered in Chapter 7. There we identified
each line with the pair of antipodal points at which it
meets the unit sphere. Thus the new interpretation of
hemispherical geometry is associated with the
geometry of lines, as well as with projective geometry.
A model of elliptic geometry is given by the
This modification of spherical geometry had some southern hemisphere with opposite points on
the equator attached together.
weird consequences near the equator. In the new
geometry, each point on the equator was considered to be the same as its antipode, directly on the
other side of the sphere. When people tried to visualize this, they could easily attach opposite
points together by wrapping the equator around itself, and they could even wrap together a small
strip made by including part of the surface near the equator. But in order to do this it was necessary
to introduce a twist, and when people tried to extend the construction over the entire southern
hemisphere, they failed. The new geometry worked all right--it did not depend on being able to put it
together in three-dimensional space. Fortunately by this time mathematicians knew of a place
where the new geometry could be built, and that was in the fourth dimension.

Each point of the equator can be attached to its antipodal point by giving the equator a twist,
then wrapping it around itself.

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