Geometry
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For other uses, see Geometry (disambiguation).
Geometry
Projecting a sphere to a plane
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Zero-dimensional
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One-dimensional
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Geometry (from Ancient Greek γεωμετρία (geōmetría) 'land measurement';
from γῆ (gê) 'earth, land' and μέτρον (métron) 'a measure')[1] is a branch
of mathematics concerned with properties of space such as the distance, shape, size, and
relative position of figures.[2] Geometry is, along with arithmetic, one of the oldest branches of
mathematics. A mathematician who works in the field of geometry is called a geometer. Until
the 19th century, geometry was almost exclusively devoted to Euclidean geometry,[a] which
includes the notions of point, line, plane, distance, angle, surface, and curve, as fundamental
concepts.[3]
Originally developed to model the physical world, geometry has applications in almost all
sciences, and also in art, architecture, and other activities that are related to graphics.
[4]
Geometry also has applications in areas of mathematics that are apparently unrelated. For
example, methods of algebraic geometry are fundamental in Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last
Theorem, a problem that was stated in terms of elementary arithmetic, and remained unsolved
for several centuries.
During the 19th century several discoveries enlarged dramatically the scope of geometry. One
of the oldest such discoveries is Carl Friedrich Gauss's Theorema Egregium ("remarkable
theorem") that asserts roughly that the Gaussian curvature of a surface is independent from
any specific embedding in a Euclidean space. This implies that surfaces can be
studied intrinsically, that is, as stand-alone spaces, and has been expanded into the theory
of manifolds and Riemannian geometry. Later in the 19th century, it appeared that geometries
without the parallel postulate (non-Euclidean geometries) can be developed without
introducing any contradiction. The geometry that underlies general relativity is a famous
application of non-Euclidean geometry.
Since the late 19th century, the scope of geometry has been greatly expanded, and the field
has been split in many subfields that depend on the underlying methods—differential
geometry, algebraic geometry, computational geometry, algebraic topology, discrete
geometry (also known as combinatorial geometry), etc.—or on the properties of Euclidean
spaces that are disregarded—projective geometry that consider only alignment of points but
not distance and parallelism, affine geometry that omits the concept of angle and
distance, finite geometry that omits continuity, and others. This enlargement of the scope of
geometry led to a change of meaning of the word "space", which originally referred to the
three-dimensional space of the physical world and its model provided by Euclidean geometry;
presently a geometric space, or simply a space is a mathematical structure on which some
geometry is defined.
