3 hours ago
(6 hours ago)purplie Wrote: In Defense of Euclid“In defence of Euclid” - what is the poet defending?
A fellow called Euclid professed
That geometry rightly assessed
Would see equal inclines
Of neighborly lines
Make them slightly standoffish at best.
And so sensibly Euclid explained
His art so pellucidly planed
With crafty designs
Full of parallel lines,
He drove other logicians insane.
And so much of life it made clear!
The Truths that we came to hold dear,
Three wrongs make a right,
A square knot is tight,
An arrow flies straight through the air!
In the end, as you know, slow as light,
Other axioms proved to have bite.
Minkowski and Einstein
Between them bent spacetime;
Riemann had stayed up all night.
But for Beauty's sake Euclid held ground,
And he measured his room all around.
With its lengths so mismatched
A black hole should have hatched,
And not a right angle was found!
Previous version
S1-3 say that the parallel lines postulate was thought so long to follow from Euclid’s axioms but it turned out it not to be so and logicians went insane trying to prove it till they found out they could not and so non Euclidean geometry was born in S4.
So much so good. It’s a tale well told.
I was in expecting the point in S5 to be that in leading maths astray for 2000 years Euclid did us a great service because he paradoxically laid the groundwork for non Euclidean geometry, as explained in S4. And so that would be the defence
But I don’t see S5 saying that. I’m not sure what it’s saying. The rhyme is tying up the poem in knots. The messaging is garbled.

