This entertaining, stimulating textbook offers anyone familiar with Euclidean geometry -- undergraduate math students, advanced high school students, and puzzle fans of any age -- an opportunity to explore taxicab geometry, a simple, non-Euclidean system that helps put Euclidean geometry in sharper perspective.
In taxicab geometry, the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line. Distance is not measured as the crow flies, but as a taxicab travels the -grid- of the city street, from block to block, vertically and horizontally, until the destination is reached. Because of...

Among the many differences between classical and p-adic objects, those related to differential equations occupy a special place. For example, a closed p-adic analytic one-form defined on a simply-connected domain does not necessarily have a primitive in the class of analytic functions. In the early 1980s, Robert Coleman discovered a way to construct primitives of analytic one-forms on certain smooth p-adic analytic curves in a bigger class of functions. Since then, there have been several attempts to generalize his ideas to smooth p-adic analytic spaces of higher dimension, but the spaces...

Richard Trudeau confronts the fundamental question of truth and its representation through mathematical models in The Non-Euclidean Revolution. First, the author analyzes geometry in its historical and philosophical setting; second, he examines a revolution every bit as significant as the Copernican revolution in astronomy and the Darwinian revolution in biology; third, on the most speculative level, he questions the possibility of absolute knowledge of the world.

Trudeau writes in a lively, entertaining, and highly accessible style. His book provides one of the most stimulating and...

Thoroughly updated, featuring new material on important topics such as hyperbolic geometry in higher dimensions and generalizations of hyperbolicity

Includes full solutions for all exercises

Successful first edition sold over 800 copies in North America

This is the definitive presentation of the history, development and philosophical significance of non-Euclidean geometry as well as of the rigorous foundations for it and for elementary Euclidean geometry, essentially according to Hilbert. Appropriate for liberal arts students, prospective high school teachers, math. majors, and even bright high school students. The first eight chapters are mostly accessible to any educated reader; the last two chapters and the two appendices contain more advanced material, such as the classification of motions, hyperbolic trigonometry, hyperbolic...

Richard Trudeau confronts the fundamental question of truth and its representation through mathematical models in The Non-Euclidean Revolution. First, the author analyzes geometry in its historical and philosophical setting; second, he examines a revolution every bit as significant as the Copernican revolution in astronomy and the Darwinian revolution in biology; third, on the most speculative level, he questions the possibility of absolute knowledge of the world. A portion of the book won the Polya Prize, a distinguished award from the Mathematical Association of America.

Outer billiards is a basic dynamical system defined relative to a convex shape in the plane. B. H. Neumann introduced this system in the 1950s, and J. Moser popularized it as a toy model for celestial mechanics. All along, the so-called Moser-Neumann question has been one of the central problems in the field. This question asks whether or not one can have an outer billiards system with an unbounded orbit. The Moser-Neumann question is an idealized version of the question of whether, because of small disturbances in its orbit, the Earth can break out of its orbit and fly away from the Sun....