Topic > The History of Geometry

Primitive geometry dates back to around 3000 BC, as one of the first advances in geometry. It started in Europe when the Egyptians used it in many ways, such as in land surveying, pyramid building, and astronomy. The next advance came from the Babylonians in 2000-500 BC Ancient clay tablets demonstrated that the Babylonians knew the Pythagorean relations. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay In 750-250 BC the Greeks practiced experimental geometry as Egypt and Babylon had done. They created the first formal mathematics of any kind by organizing geometry with logical rules. The next advancement in Euclid's geometry game. In 300 BC he wrote a text entitled "Elements". This stated that ideas could be proven through a small set of statements (postulates). The five postulates were: A straight line segment can be drawn joining any two points. Given any straight line segment, a circle can be drawn having the segment as the radius and an endpoint as the center. All right angles are congruent. If you draw two lives that intersect a third line such that the sum of the internal angles, then the two lines inevitably, must intersect on the side if extended indefinitely. There was much controversy over the fifth postulate. The fifth postulate states: "Given a line and a point not on the line, it is possible to draw a line exactly parallel to the line through the given point." Many mathematicians in subsequent centuries attempted unsuccessfully to prove this postulate. In 1600 AD, René Descartes made one of the greatest advances in geometry. He connected algebra and geometry. One myth has it that he was observing a fly on the ceiling when he conceived of locating points on a plane with a pair of numbers. Fermat also discovered coordinate geometry, but Descartes' version is the one we use today. In the early 1800s Bolyai and Lobachevsky created the first non-Euclidean geometries. Since no one could prove Euclid's fifth postulate, they devised new geometries with "strange" notions of parallelism. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Gauss and Riemann laid the foundation for differential geometry. Differential geometry combines geometry with computational techniques to provide a method for studying geometry on curved surfaces. Please note: this is just an example. Get a custom paper from our expert writers now. Get a Custom Essay From the late 1800s to the early 1900s, Mandelbrot and some other researchers also studied fractal geometry. Fractals are geometric figures that model many natural structures. The invention of computers aided the study of fractals.