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For many, many years a lot of mathematicians struggled to prove the
Fifth Postulate of Euclid ("through a point outside of a line
there exists a parallel to that line"). It was only in 1831 that
Bolyai and Lobacevski realized (independently) that this statement
cannot be proved based on the remaining axioms and that a geometry
based on a negation of this postulate is equally possible. What they
started to build was continued by many mathematicians, lead to the
idea that our space might be curved, and was lately used by Einstein
in his Relativity theory. In my talk, I shall try to explain the main
moments of this story. The talk is mainly addressed to an audience
with only high-school knowledge of mathematics.
Pizza will be served.
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Tesselation of the hyperbolic plane (Escher)
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