April 08, 2017 Saturday

Bedtime Story

The Impossibility of Proving the Fifth Postulate was a Watershed Event

These 26 minds that I inventoried last night were the celestial minds that transformed mathematics forever.

Their mathematical work had a profound impact on theoretical physics giving the world very novel, and earlier unimaginable way of looking at the universe.

In fact, the mathematics construed by these nineteenth century geniuses began to over dwarf the world of physics.

Mathematics that was previously used by the physicists to explain the mechanisms of the working of the universe finally began to take on the role of being the only means of describing the bizarre worlds of both the micro world of quantum mechanics and the cosmic theory of relativity. 

The words of a normal language simply do not suffice to describe what happens in these extreme ends of the universe that we live in.

We apes who evolved in the middle world of survival and reproduction (just like all life forms) are deeply handicapped in our imagination when the reality stretches past these common mundane activities. 

It is with mathematics that perhaps we stand a chance to soar high and fly with the eagles, metaphorically speaking.

I would like to bring to your notice that not a single name mentioned here belongs to the United States, nor to the Arab world which infused this knowledge into Europe through the outstretched arm of Italy.

Nineteenth century mathematics is one of those revolutions that is little known and very poorly understood by an average ape.

Perhaps it is so because very few men and women dare to write popular books on mathematics as it is a risky path to venture into when it comes to monetary benefits.

What surprises me is this strange dichotomy of such extreme enlightenment of the continent and yet it remaining so politically volatile throughout the 1800s.

The masses, politics and the nation states behave nearly in the same manner all the times no matter what great individuals within them achieve.

One of the most striking development that took place in this century was the solution to another of a gemoetry problem of Greek antiquity; the problem of Euclid’s fifth postulate or the parallel postulate.

To many great minds, there was nothing really “self-evident” about this postulate.

Many tried to prove it from the other postulates, but to no avail.

One must keep in mind that failure to prove something is NOT a proof of its impossibility.

Yet, it was finally in the nineteenth century, thanks to minds like Gauss, Bolyai, Lobachevsky and Riemann that the impossibility of proving the fifth postulate was proven.

Psychologically, this was a watershed event for mathematics; for the first time there was a proof of proving an impossibility of proving a proposition in a given formal system using its axioms.

Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.in/

                              

Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.