II2 Geometry Jeremy Gray - Princeton University Press：二几何杰瑞米灰色普林斯顿大学出版社.pdfVIP

II.2. Geometry 83 Menninger, K. 1992. Number Words and Number Symbols: of geometry from most other kinds of science is its A Cultural History of Numbers. New York: Dover. (Trans- highly deductive nature. It really seems that by tak- lated by P. Broneer from the revised German edition of ing the simplest of concepts and thinking hard about 1957/58: Zahlwort und Ziffer. Eine Kulturgeschichte der them one can build up an impressive, deductive body Zahl. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht.) of knowledge about space without having to gather Reid, C. 2006. From Zero to Infinity: What Makes Numbers experimental evidence. Interesting. Natick, MA: A. K. Peters. But can we? Is it really as simple as that? Can we have genuine knowledge of space without ever leaving our II.2 Geometry armchairs? It turns out that we cannot: there are other Jeremy Gray geometries, also based on the concepts of length and angle, that have every claim to be useful, but that dis- 1 Introduction agree with Euclidean geometry. This is an astonishing discovery of the early nineteenth century, but, before it The modern view of geometry was inspired by the novel