Euclid's Window

The Story of Geometry from Parallel Lines to Hyperspace

Leonard Mlodinow

306 pages, parution le 26/02/2002

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Résumé

Through Euclid's Window Leonard Mlodinow brilliantly and delightfully leads us on a journey through five revolutions in geometry, from the Greek concept of parallel lines to the latest notions of hyperspace. Here is an altogether new, refreshing, alternative history of math revealing how simple questions anyone might ask about space - in the living room or in some other galaxy - have been the hidden engine of the highest achievements in science and technology.

Mlodinow reveals how geometry's first revolution began with a 'little' scheme hatched by Pythagoras: the invention of a system of abstract rules that could model the universe. That modest idea was the basis of scientific civilization. But further advance was halted when the Western mind nodded off into the Dark Ages. Finally in the fourteenth century an obscure bishop in France invented the graph and heralded the next revolution: the marriage of geometry and number. Then, while intrepid mariners were sailing back and forth across the Atlantic to the New World, a fifteen-year-old genius realized that, like the earth's surface, space could be curved. Could parallel lines really meet? Could the angles of a triangle really add up to more - or less - than 180 degrees? The curved-space revolution reinvented both mathematics and physics; it also set the stage for a patent office clerk named Einstein to add time to the dimensions of space. His great geometric revolution ushered in the modern era of physics.

Today we are in the midst of a new revolution. At American universities such as Caltech, Princeton, and at other universities around the world, scientists are recognizing that all the varied and wondrous forces of nature can be understood through geometry - a weird new geometry. It is a thrilling math of extra, twisted dimensions, in which space and time, matter and energy, are all intertwined and revealed as consequences of a deep, underlying structure of the universe.

Based on Mlodinow's extensive historical research; his studies alongside colleagues such as Richard Feynman and Kip Thorne; and interviews with leading physicists and mathematicians such as Murray Gell-Mann, Edward Witten, and Brian Greene, Euclid's Window is an extraordinary blend of rigorous, authoritative investigation and accessible, good-humoured storytelling that makes a stunningly original argument asserting the primacy of geometry. For those who have looked through Euclid's Window, no space, no thing, and no time will ever be quite the same.

Contents

Introduction
The story of Euclid
The story of Descartes
The story of Gauss
The story of Einstein
The story of Witten
Epilogue
Notes
Index

L'auteur - Leonard Mlodinow

Leonard Mlodinow est physicien au California Institute of Technology.

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Caractéristiques techniques

	PAPIER
Éditeur(s)	Penguin
Auteur(s)	Leonard Mlodinow
Parution	26/02/2002
Nb. de pages	306
Format	13,7 x 24
Couverture	Relié
Poids	526g
Intérieur	Noir et Blanc
EAN13	9780713996340
ISBN13	978-0-7139-9634-0