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Euclid (/ ˈ j uː k l ɪ d /; Ancient Greek: Εὐκλείδης; fl. 300 BC) was an ancient Greek mathematician active as a geometer and logician. [2] Considered the "father of geometry", [3] he is chiefly known for the Elements treatise, which established the foundations of geometry that largely dominated the field until the early 19th century.
Euclid postulated that visual rays proceed from the eyes onto objects, and that the different visual properties of the objects were determined by how the visual rays struck them. Here the red square is an actual object, while the yellow plane shows how the object is perceived. 1573 edition in Italian
Since Euclid's postulate is equivalent to the statement that the sum of the internal angles of a triangle is 180°, he considered both the hypothesis that the angles add up to more or less than 180°. The first led to the conclusion that straight lines are finite, contradicting Euclid's second postulate. So Saccheri correctly rejected it.
In Euclid's Elements, the first 28 Propositions and Proposition 31 avoid using the parallel postulate, and therefore are valid in absolute geometry.One can also prove in absolute geometry the exterior angle theorem (an exterior angle of a triangle is larger than either of the remote angles), as well as the Saccheri–Legendre theorem, which states that the sum of the measures of the angles in ...
The very old problem of proving Euclid's Fifth Postulate, the "Parallel Postulate", from his first four postulates had never been forgotten. Beginning not long after Euclid, many attempted demonstrations were given, but all were later found to be faulty, through allowing into the reasoning some principle which itself had not been proved from ...
1854 – Arthur Cayley shows that quaternions can be used to represent rotations in four-dimensional space, 1858 – August Ferdinand Möbius invents the Möbius strip, 1870 – Felix Klein constructs an analytic geometry for Lobachevski's geometry thereby establishing its self-consistency and the logical independence of Euclid's fifth postulate,
Examples of compass-only constructions include Napoleon's problem. It is impossible to take a square root with just a ruler, so some things that cannot be constructed with a ruler can be constructed with a compass; but (by the Poncelet–Steiner theorem ) given a single circle and its center, they can be constructed.
Euclid did not postulate the converse of his fifth postulate, which is one way to distinguish Euclidean geometry from elliptic geometry. The Elements contains the proof of an equivalent statement (Book I, Proposition 27): If a straight line falling on two straight lines make the alternate angles equal to one another, the straight lines will be ...