ISBN-13: 9783663012993 / Niemiecki / Miękka / 2012 / 256 str.
ISBN-13: 9783663012993 / Niemiecki / Miękka / 2012 / 256 str.
As a boy of 12, Einstein encountered the wonder of Euclidean plane geometry in a little book that he called "das heilige Geometrie-Buchlein" ("the holy geometry booklet"). Something similar happened to Dierck Liebscher - though admittedly not quite at the tender age of 12. As a physics student in Dresden, he heard lectures on projective geometry. The delight he got from these lectures has remained with him through his working life, and he has now passed on some of it in the present book. It is a rather unusual book and all the better for it. One of the sad things about the hectic pace and competitiveness of modern scientific research is that truly beautiful discoveries and insights of earlier ages get completely forgotten. This is very th true of projective geometry and the great synthesis achieved in the 19 century by Cayley and Klein, who showed that the nine consistent geometries of the plane can all be derived from a common basis by projection. When Minkowski discovered that the most basic facts of Einstein's relativity can be expressed as the pseudo-Euclidean geometry of space and time, Klein hailed it as a triumph of his Erlangen program. For it showed that the trigonometry of pseudo-Euclidean space is the kinematics of relativity."