GAUSS - Rich Ligo

Speaker: 
Rich Ligo
Topic: 
The World Is Not Flat: An Introduction to Modern Geometry

Abstract:  What if I told you that the majority of ideas conveyed in a high school geometry class are thousands of years old?  What if I told you that your understanding of parallelism was tremendously incomplete?  Believe it or not, one can argue that the first true departure from ancient Greek geometry wasn't published until 1826!  In this talk we describe the nature of this departure and its implications upon the discipline of geometry.  We begin by defining Euclidean geometry, detail the effects of the negation of Euclid's fifth postulate and the arising non-Euclidean geometries, and end with a discussion of how this relates to the curvature of a surface.

Event Date: 
September 15, 2015 - 3:30pm to 4:30pm
Location: 
118 MLH
Calendar Category: 
Seminar