First published: 19971 languageISBN: 9781461268376
Description
Geometry: Plane and Fancy offers a fascinating tour through parts of geometry that students are unlikely to see in the rest of their studies while, at the same time, anchoring their excursions to the well-known parallel postulate of Euclid. The author shows how alternatives to Euclid's fifth postulate lead to interesting and different patterns and symmetries.
In the process of examining geometric objects, the author incorporates some graph theory, some topology, and the algebra of complex (and hypercomplex) numbers. Nevertheless, the book has only mild prerequisites. Readers are assumed to have had a course in Euclidean geometry (including some analytic geometry and some algebra) at the high school level. Although many concepts introduced are advanced, the mathematical techniques are not.