Mathematics 120 - Explorations in Geometry

The system of geometry devised by the ancient Greeks was immutable until the nineteenth century, when it was put in a broader framework better able to accommodate the varied interests of physical science and mathematics. In this course, we begin by a careful and close observation of what we can see and physically construct, reasoning informally about those observations. We will then explore a selection of geometry from the time of Euclid to the recent past, including curved surfaces and the hyperbolic plane.