Geometry

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Geometry (from the Ancient Greek: ; geo- "earth", -metron "measurement") is a branch
of mathematics concerned with questions of shape, size, relative position of figures, and the
properties of space. A mathematician who works in the field of geometry is called a geometer.
Geometry arose independently in a number of early cultures as a body of practical knowledge
concerning lengths, areas, and volumes, with elements of formal mathematical science emerging in
the West as early as Thales (6th century BC). By the 3rd century BC, geometry was put into
an axiomatic form by Euclid, whose treatmentEuclidean geometryset a standard for many
centuries to follow.[1] Archimedes developed ingenious techniques for calculating areas and volumes,
in many ways anticipating modern integral calculus. The field of astronomy, especially as it relates to
mapping the positions of stars and planets on the celestial sphere and describing the relationship
between movements of celestial bodies, served as an important source of geometric problems
during the next one and a half millennia. In the classical world, both geometry and astronomy were
considered to be part of the Quadrivium, a subset of the seven liberal arts considered essential for a
free citizen to master.
The introduction of coordinates by Ren Descartes and the concurrent developments
of algebra marked a new stage for geometry, since geometric figures such as plane curves could
now be represented analytically in the form of functions and equations. This played a key role in the
emergence of infinitesimal calculus in the 17th century. Furthermore, the theory
of perspective showed that there is more to geometry than just the metric properties of figures:
perspective is the origin of projective geometry. The subject of geometry was further enriched by the
study of the intrinsic structure of geometric objects that originated with Euler and Gauss and led to
the creation of topology and differential geometry.
In Euclid's time, there was no clear distinction between physical and geometrical space. Since the
19th-century discovery of non-Euclidean geometry, the concept of space has undergone a radical
transformation and raised the question of which geometrical space best fits physical space. With the
rise of formal mathematics in the 20th century, 'space' (whether 'point', 'line', or 'plane') lost its
intuitive contents, so today one has to distinguish between physical space, geometrical spaces (in
which 'space', 'point' etc. still have their intuitive meanings) and abstract spaces. Contemporary
geometry considers manifolds, spaces that are considerably more abstract than the
familiar Euclidean space, which they only approximately resemble at small scales. These spaces
may be endowed with additional structure which allow one to speak about length. Modern geometry
has many ties to physics as is exemplified by the links between pseudo-Riemannian geometry

and general relativity. One of the youngest physical theories, string theory, is also very geometric in
flavour.
While the visual nature of geometry makes it initially more accessible than other mathematical areas
such as algebra ornumber theory, geometric language is also used in contexts far removed from its
traditional, Euclidean provenance (for example, in fractal geometry and algebraic geometry).