## 1. Epistemological issues in Euclid's geometry



A detailed examination of geometry as Euclid presented it reveals a
number of problems. It is worth considering these in some detail
because the epistemologically convincing status of Euclid's
*Elements* was uncontested by almost everyone until the later
decades of the 19th century. Chief among these problems are
a lack of clarity in the definitions of straight line and plane, and a
confusion between shortest and straightest as a, or the, fundamental
geometrical property. (See the many comments collected in
Heath's edition of Euclid's *Elements*.) The
implications for the parallel postulate will be treated separately,
see the section on 
 Non-Euclidean geometry.



The first four Books of Euclid's *Elements* are about
straight lines and circles, but it is well known that the concept of a
straight line receives only a most unsatisfactory definition. A line
is said to be "a breadthless length", and a straight line
to be a line "which lies evenly with the points on
itself". This may help convince readers that they share a common
conception of the straight line, but it is no use if unexpected
difficulties arise in the creation of a theory--as we shall
see.



To those who decided to read the *Elements* carefully and see
how the crucial terms are used, it became apparent that the account is
both remarkably scrupulous in some ways and flawed in others. Straight
lines arise almost always as finite segments that can be indefinitely
extended, but, as many commentators noted, although Euclid stated that
there is a segment joining any two points he did not explicitly say
that this segment is unique. This is a flaw in the proof of the first
congruence theorem (I.4) which says that if two triangles have two
pairs of sides equal and the included angle is equal then the
remaining sides of the triangles are equal.



Theorem I.4 is interesting in another way. Theorem I.2 carries a
scrupulous, and by no means obvious, proof that a given line segment
in a plane may be copied exactly with one of its end points at any
prescribed point in the plane. Theorem I.4 properly requires a proof
that an angle may likewise be copied exactly at an arbitrary point,
but this Euclid cannot provide at this stage (one is given in I.23,
which, however, builds on these earlier results). He therefore gave a
bald claim that one triangle may be copied exactly in an arbitrary
position, which makes one wonder why such care was expended on I.2. In
fact, the whole concept of motion of figures was to become a prolonged
topic of discussion in Arabic/Islamic times. (On deduction in Euclid,
see Mueller 1981.)



A plausible reading of *Elements* Book I is that a straight
line can be understood as having a direction, so that there is a
straight line in every direction at every point and only one straight
line at a given point in a given direction. The parallel postulate
then says that lines which cross a given line in equal angles point in
the same direction and do not meet. But this must be regarded as an
interpretation, and one that requires quite some work to make
precise.



Direction is, nonetheless, a more plausible candidate than distance;
Euclid did not start with the idea that the straight line joining two
distinct points is the shortest curve joining them. The relevant
primitive concept in the *Elements* is that of equality of
segments, such as all the radii of a given circle. Euclid stated as
Common Notion 4 that if two segments can be made to coincide then they
are equal, and (in the troublesome I.4) he used the converse, that if
two segments are equal then they can be made to coincide. Segments are
such that either one is smaller than the other or they are equal, and
in I.20 Euclid showed that "in any triangle two sides taken
together in any manner are greater than the remaining one." This
result has become known as the triangle inequality, and it goes a long
way to proving that the line segment joining any two distinct points
is the shortest curve through those points. Once the parallel
postulate is introduced Euclid showed that opposite sides of a
parallelogram are equal, and so the distance between a pair of
parallel lines is a constant.



But there is another weakness in the *Elements* that is also
worth noting, although it drew less attention, and this is the nature
of the plane. The plane has another sub-standard definition, evidently
modelled on that of the line: "a plane surface is a surface
which lies evenly with the straight lines on itself" (and,
unsurprisingly, "a surface is that which has length and breadth
only"). After that, the word 'plane' is not
mentioned in the first four Books, although they are solely concerned
with plane geometry. When Euclid turned to solid geometry in Book IX,
he began with three theorems to show successively that a straight line
cannot lie partly in a plane and partly not, that if two straight
lines cut one another they lie in a plane and every triangle lies in a
plane, and that if two planes meet then they do so in a line. However,
he can only be said to claim these results and make them plausible,
because he cannot use his definition of a plane to prove any of them.
They do, however, form the basis for the next theorems: there is a
perpendicular to a plane at any point of the plane, and all the lines
perpendicular to a given line at a given point are on a plane.



Once again, I.4 is problematic. Consider, for the purpose of a
*reduction ad absurdum,* that one has two triangles, \(ABC\)
and \(A'BC\) on the same side of their common base \(BC\), and such
that \(BA = BA'\) and \(CA = CA'\). It is intended to show that
therefore the vertices \(A\) and \(A'\) coincide, and for this one
must, as Gauss observed (in unpublished remarks, see Gauss
*Werke* 8, 193), use the fact that the triangles lie in the
same plane. A good definition of a plane is required, one that allows
this result to be proved.


### 1.1 The question of diagrammatic constructions



Euclid's treatment of geometry has, through the ages, been
celebrated as a perfect deductive presentation of a science, and
certainly Euclid made great efforts to obtain a most careful logical
chain of truths. Book I in particular is impressive (see Lambert 1786,
Mueller 1981). Yet his proof-method gives a central role to diagrams,
for which reason Euclid's work came under severe criticism in
the late nineteenth century. This is because, from the early
eighteenth century, there was a gradual dominance of algebraic methods
and a process of de-geometrization of mathematics, which evolved into
the so-called "arithmetization" of mathematics. Diagrams
were demoted to the role of mere auxiliaries in mathematical
reasoning, and a careful logical presentation of axioms and proofs was
implemented. One result of this movement would be Hilbert's
work, examined below.



It seems nevertheless true that the origins of geometric thinking
have, in different cultures, always been associated with visuo-spatial
reasoning, and in particular with figures and diagrams. This is a key
reason for the celebrated beauty and appeal of geometry. Kant came
close to capturing the spirit of Euclid's style of work when he
insisted that mathematical proof is based on the "construction
of concepts" in intuition. The geometer works with carefully
defined concepts, for which Euclid always shows how to construct
instances (thus, e.g., proposition 1 shows how to construct an
equilateral triangle given a line segment, and prop. 31 how to
construct a parallel to a given line). But, as Kant emphasized in a
famous passage of the *Critique*, logical analysis of the
concepts could never provide the means of proof - an appeal to
the construction (say, of a triangle) is required, offering a concrete
instance either in empirical intuition (an external representation) or
in pure intuition. Next, on the basis of the postulates, new elements
are incorporated into the construction, which make it possible to
interconnect concepts and obtain new results. So it is that one can
prove diagrammatically, e.g., that the angles of a triangle add up to
180o (which, by the way, requires an appeal to the parallel
postulate).



The proof of prop. 1 has famously been objected for having a
gap. Given a segment \(AB\), an equilateral triangle is constructed by
drawing two circles with \(AB\) as radius, one centered on \(A\) and
the other centered on \(B\). The objection is that Euclid has no
continuity principle, hence the existence of point \(C\) (the intersection
of both circles) is not warranted. But such an objection ignores the
proper role of diagrammatic reasoning in Euclid. Manders (2008) has
provided an insightful analysis of how information is obtained from
text and diagram in the first books of the Elements, in careful
distribution of roles, which led him to distinguish between exact
information (from text only) and co-exact information (taken from the
diagram). Notice that a diagram is not just a figure, but a reasoning
tool, a semiotic element with rules of manipulation - and,
according to Manders, careful (implicit) rules for the extraction of
information. For further details on this topic, see the entry on
 diagrams, sections 4.2 and 4.3. 



In this connection it is worth mentioning a famous fallacious proof
that all triangles are isosceles, which Klein made well known. One can
show that this pseudo-proof violates the rules of the game of Euclid,
extracting exact information from the diagram, which is never allowed.
On the other hand, one should notice that Euclid's postulates
are not so much axioms in the Hilbertian sense, as rules of
construction that are applied in the elaboration and handling of
diagrams. Most of Euclid's postulates establish that certain
constructions can be performed, the drawing of a line or a circle, the
meeting of two lines under certain conditions (this last is Euclid's
own formulation of postulate 5 "of the parallels"). As
for the central role of such rules of construction in Ancient
geometry, it is interesting to remark that the Greeks said
'diagramma' to mean a mathematical proposition. 



But geometric knowledge, which began close to visual thinking
(Giaquinto 2007) and the practical manipulation of symbols, i.e.,
diagrams as concrete representations, gradually evolved to become a
more abstract edifice. Already with Euclid, Archimedes and Apollonius
there is an effort to give form to well-crafted concepts, which make
precise, ideal, and general what was suggested by intuition; likewise,
the way of handling diagrams is anything but naive (see e.g. prop. 10
in Book III, but also props. 7, 14 or 27 in Book I). And in due
course, a critical stage was attained, when the assumptions of
geometric knowledge were made explicit and subjected to scrutiny,
looking for deeper foundations and for alternatives. At this stage,
represented above all by the nineteenth century, the diagram had to be
relegated in favor of more explicit, abstract, relational methods for
the analysis of theoretical assumptions and developments.


### 1.2 Synthetic method vs. measurement



Let us say that a purely synthetic geometry is one that deals with
primitive concepts such as straight lines and planes in something like
the above fashion. That is, it takes the straightness of the straight
line and the flatness of the plane as fundamental, and appeals to the
incidence properties just described. It is resistant to the idea of
taking distance as a fundamental concept, or to the idea of replacing
statements in geometry by statements about numbers (say, as
coordinates), although it is not hostile to coordinate geometry being
erected upon it.



Let us also say for present purposes that a metrical geometry is one
in which distance is a primitive concept, so line segments can be said
to have the same length, congruent figures have corresponding sides
equal in length, and geometrical transformations preserve lengths. We
can also allow that similarities are allowed: these are
transformations that produce scale copies of figures. (No theorem in
Euclid's *Elements* depends on the actual size of a
figure: any theorem that applies to one figure applies to all its
scale copies.)



Elementary geometry in the modern West moved in a confused way towards
making distance the primary primitive concept, while often maintaining
the Euclidean emphasis on straightness, thus frequently muddling the
implications of the different concepts. A notable example of this
being nonetheless productive was John Wallis's argument in
defence of the parallel postulate (given as a lecture in 1665 and
published in Wallis 1693). It rested, as he realised, on the ability
to make arbitrary scale copies of a triangle, and this seems to be the
first time that the equivalence was recognised between these two
systems:


1. Euclid's *Elements* with the parallel postulate
2. Euclid's *Elements* without that postulate but with
the assumption that arbitrary similar figures exist added.



In the *Encylopedie Methodique* (1784: vol. 2,
132), d'Alembert defined geometry as the science of the
properties of extension, i.e., of bodies (and surfaces and lines)
considered as merely extended and figured. Its principles are founded,
in his view, on truths so evident that it is not possible to contest
them. A line (in the sense of a curve) is one-dimensional, and the
shortest line joining two points is the straight line. Parallel lines
are lines that, however far they are extended, will never meet because
they are everywhere equidistant. D'Alembert was not keen on
axiomatic presentation of the material, and so it was also with many
other eighteenth-century authors.



Adrien-Marie Legendre was a mathematician sympathetic to the didactic
aims of the *Elements* but not to its original formulations. He
wrote several different versions of his *Elements de
geometrie* (1794) with a view to restoring
"Euclidean rigour" in the teaching of geometry, which in his
view had been corroded by texts, such as one by Clairaut (1741), that
relied on notions of self-evidence. They differ largely, as he had to
admit, in their unsuccessful attempts to deduce the parallel
postulate.



In all these editions Legendre took a firmly metrical point of view,
taking as given algebra and the theory of proportions. His opening
definition of the first edition proclaimed that "Geometry is a
science that has as its object the measure of extent". Extent,
he explained, has three dimensions, length, breadth, and height; a
line is a length without breadth, its extremities are called points
and a point therefore has no extent. A straight line is the shortest
path from one point to another; surfaces have length and breadth but
no height or depth; and a plane is a surface in which if two arbitrary
points are joined by a straight line this line lies entirely in the
surface. Legendre then set out to prove even some truths that Euclid
had preferred to assume, such as (Legendre's first result): any
two right angles are equal. The notion of congruence was central to
his approach, and familiar congruence theorems follow in each edition
until the parallel postulate could no longer be ignored. Once the
existence of parallel lines was assured Legendre argued that they were
equidistant.



In fact, Legendre's attempts to restore rigour to the treatment
of elementary geometry was no better than Euclid's, and in some
ways worse, not only because his attempts to prove the parallel
postulate inevitably failed, but because he smuggled more into his
account than he realised. But its chief significance for present
purposes is that it exemplifies the attempt to ground elementary
geometry on a concept of distance, or more precisely, on the idea that
a straight line is the curve of shortest distance between any of its
points. Distance itself is not defined.



Joseph Fourier, in a discussion with Monge, also took the concept of
distance as fundamental, and began with three-dimensional space. He
then employed equidistance to define successively the sphere, the
plane (as the points equidistant from two given points) and the line
(as the points equidistant from three given points). This did at least
give him definitions of these previously troubling concepts (see
Bonola 1912, 54).



To conclude: a reasonable view at the time would have been that
metrical geometry needed to put its house in order, and it probably
could not do so by grafting the concept of distance onto a structure
modelled on Euclid's *Elements*. This is an awkward
position for traditional geometry to be in, and it may have opened
people's minds to the possibilities of alternatives. Certainly,
two were to be produced. One, projective geometry, amplified and
improved the synthetic side of geometry. The other, non-Euclidean
geometry, was a new and challenging metrical geometry. But before we
look at them, we turn to contemporary philosophical discussions of
geometry.


## 2. Epistemological issues in applied geometry



It is a useful over-simplification to say that around 1800 the view
was that there is one physical space, and that this space is described
by the geometry in Euclid's *Elements*, which is the only
candidate for such a task. Disputes concerned the rigorous
presentation of this geometry and the limits of its application to the
physical world. The nature of the knowledge that geometry provided was
also a matter of some discussion.



Traditionally, geometry had been regarded as a paradigm of truth,
certainty, and justification. This can be found e.g. in many authors
of the seventeenth century. Descartes was ready to criticize the
Euclidian method for a certain stiffness, which made it difficult to
find the solution of new problems, and he sought to alleviate it by
combining algebra and geometry; yet, even so, he always emphasized the
clarity and evidence of geometry and its demonstrations. According to
Pascal, geometry was the perfect illustration of the methods of
demonstrating truths, and of establishing a body of propositions in
methodical order. Leibniz, Spinoza, and others, continued taking
mathematics as a model for philosohical discourse.



Locke (see the entry on
 Locke)
 took from the Aristotelian tradition the idea that Euclidean geometry
and rational theology are the exemplars of scientific knowledge, but
sought to ground his philosophy in intuitive, demonstrative, and
sensitive kinds of knowledge. Intuitive knowledge is what is grasped
immediately; demonstrative knowledge avails itself of the intermediate
steps of a proof, as in geometry. Both these forms of knowledge are
certain. Sensitive knowledge is not certain: it is what we learn
through our senses, it presents effects but not causes, it is at best
partial and may be deceptive. Space can be thought of as composed of
all (actual and possible) positions of objects; pure space is space
with all solid bodies removed, and distance the primitive concept we
use to discuss the separation between bodies.



Locke offered arguments against innatist interpretations of our
knowledge of space and figures, emphasizing the primary role of
experience (see the entry on Molyneux problem). Yet in his *An
Essay Concerning Human Understanding* (1690) Locke asserted
that



> 
> 
> ...the idea of a right-lined triangle necessarily carries with it
> an equality of its angles to two right ones. Nor can we conceive this
> relation, this connexion of these two ideas, to be possibly mutable,
> or to depend on any arbitrary Power, which of choice made it thus, or
> could make it otherwise. (*Essay* IV.iii.29, pp.
> 559-560)
> 
> 
> 



Sensitive knowledge of the corresponding objects, however, could never
have this degree of certainty, and because our knowledge derives from
our knowledge of objects it would seem that scientific knowledge of
space is of a different kind from our knowledge of geometry. Thus, for
Locke, Euclidean geometry provided one kind of knowledge, and
experience and scientific experiment, another. Indeed, one might say
that an epistemological gap remains to this day in philosophy in the
form of a distinction between empirical and a priori knowledge that is
still widely recognised.



In Kant's *Critique of Pure Reason* (1781/1787) (see the
entry
 Kant's views on space and time)
 the situation is more complicated or sophisticated. Kant introduced
the notion of a priori knowledge in contrast to a posteriori, and
synthetic knowledge in contrast to analytical knowledge to allow for
the existence of knowledge that did not rely on experience (and was
thus a priori) but was not tautological in character (and therefore
synthetic and not analytic). The
contentious class of synthetic a priori statements includes the truths
of Euclidean geometry; thus he ascribed certainty and necessity to
Euclidean geometry. Kant associated geometric knowledge with the pure
intution of space; to know that an isosceles triangle (i.e. with two
equal sides) has two equal angles at the base, the mathematician must
produce a particular construction that makes the truth of the claim
demonstrable (see *Critique,* A 716, B 744).



Among the French philosophes, the dominant position in the 1740s was
the Cartesian one, which, as exemplified by Clairaut's
*Elemens de geometrie* (1741) was
perhaps unduly naive in its insistence on clear and immediate
ideas. The position of d'Alembert, in his articles in the
*Encylopedie Methodique* (1784), was more
sophisticated. The objects of geometry are to be understood by
abstracting from bodies every quality except that of being divisible
and figured extents. Among these objects are lines, that lack breadth,
and surfaces, that lack depth. Truths established about the objects of
geometry are purely abstract and hypothetical, because there is no
such thing, for example, as a perfect circle. The demonstrated
properties can hold of actual circles only insofar as the actual
object approaches the state of being a perfect circle,



> 
> 
> They are, in some sense, a limit and, if one can put it this way, the
> asymptote of physical truths, the term for those objects that approach
> as closely as one wishes without ever arriving at it exactly. (see
> *Encylopedie Methodique* II, 132)
> 
> 
> 



However, if mathematical theorems do not exactly hold in nature, these
theorems serve with more than sufficient precision in practice. To be
demonstrated with complete rigour they must be considered as holding
of bodies in a state of abstract perfection that they do not really
have.



> 
> 
> The curves studied in geometry are not perfectly straight nor
> perfectly curved, the surfaces are not perfectly flat nor perfectly
> curved, but the more nearly they are so, the more they approach the
> state of having those properties that one proves about lines exactly
> straight or curved, and of surfaces exactly flat or curved.
> 
> 
> 



These reflexions, d'Alembert continued, will be enough to refute
the sceptics, who complain that geometrical objects do not really
exist, and others ignorant of mathematics who regard it as a useless
game.



It would seem, therefore, that philosophers found no problems in
Euclid's *Elements*, but Hume, d'Alembert, and
others of an empiricist persuasion qualified the applicability of the
theorems on the grounds that the objects of geometry might have no
corresponding objects in the world. Philosophers more open to the idea
of a wide range of certain knowledge (as, for example, Kant) could
grant geometrical theorems the status of a priori truths that cannot
be other than they are.


### 2.1 Implications of mechanics



Physical space was the naive, three-dimensional version of the
space of Euclid's *Elements* and of Cartesian
coordinatised three-dimensional geometry, and this was how Newton had
regarded it in his *Principia Mathematica* (1687). It was
conceived of as a neutral arena, unaffected by matter or forces, but
conditioning the movements of physical bodies under various kinds of
forces. Chief among these was the force of gravity, which
mathematicians in the Cartesian tradition regarded as a mysterious,
even unacceptable, concept when it was introduced, but which by the
start of the 19th century had been shown by Laplace to be
capable of dealing well with all the known motions of the solar
system. As a consequence, gravity had become a natural, primitive
concept no longer in need of further explanation, and by 1800 it was
reasonable of people who worked on the new theories of magnetism and
electricity to consider them as forces and to model them, where
appropriate, on Newtonian gravity.



Physical space, as described by Newton in his *Principia,* is
to be studied by passing from observations of bodies in motion
relative to one another and timed by an arbitrary clock to the
corresponding true motion in absolute space and time. As Newton put it
at the end of his first Scholium, the purpose of his treatise was to
show



> 
> 
> how to determine true motions from their causes, effects, and apparent
> differences, and, conversely, of how to determine from motions,
> whether true or apparent, their causes and effects.
> 
> 
> 



There was clearly no doubt in Newton's mind about the Euclidean
nature of physical space, and indeed there seems to have been no
doubts among astronomers in the 17th or 18th century that
space was describable in the terms used in Euclid's
*Elements*. It is also likely that the growing recognition of
the merits of Newton's physics cemented a belief that space was
three-dimensional, homogeneous, isotropic, and to be described as if
it was an infinite coordinate grid, thus exemplifying the
theorems--if not precisely the definitions--of the
*Elements*.



The interaction between geometrical aspects of physical space, and
mechanical behaviour of bodies, is clear in the statement of
Newton's first law (see the entry on inertial frames):



> 
> 
> Every body perseveres in its state of being at rest or of moving
> uniformly straight forward, except insofar as it is compelled to
> change its state by forces impressed.
> 
> 
> 



There is also the result that a homogeneous spherical solid exerts the
same gravitational effect on other bodies as would an equal mass
concentrated at the centre of the body. That is to say, such bodies
behave in a way that is provably, and not merely approximately, the
same as point masses. In this way points and lines acquire physical
significance in his theory of dynamics.



It was Laplace who gave the strongest argument for saying that
physical space obeys Euclidean geometry. In his *Exposition du
systeme du monde* of 1796 (see Book V, Ch. V, p. 472) he
added an interesting note (quoted in Bonola 1912: 54) to say that



> 
> 
> The attempts of geometers to prove Euclid's Postulate on
> Parallels have been up till now futile. However, no one can doubt this
> postulate and the theorems which Euclid deduced from it. Thus the
> notion of space includes a special property, self-evident, without
> which the properties of parallels cannot be rigorously established.
> The idea of a bounded region, e.g., the circle, contains nothing which
> depends on its absolute magnitude. But if we imagine its radius to
> diminish, we are brought without fail to the diminution in the same
> ratio of its circumference and the sides of all the inscribed figures.
> This proportionality appears to me a more natural postulate than that
> of Euclid, and it is worthy of note that it is discovered afresh in
> the results of the theory of universal gravitation.
> 
> 
> 



This is strikingly similar to the view of Wallis well over a century
before, although Laplace did not mention Wallis and may not have known
of his discussion on the parallel postulate.



Around 1800, therefore, it was generally true that problems with the
truth claims of Euclidean geometry had been located among the problems
about our knowledge of the external world. Confidence in philosophical
and scientific circles in the validity of Euclidean geometry per se
was very high.


## 3. Projective geometry



In the opinion of many in the 19th century, Euclidean
geometry lost its fundamental status to a geometry that was regarded
as more general: projective geometry. (For an introduction to geometry
in the 19th century, see Gray 2011. Projective geometry is
described in the entry,
 Nineteenth Century Geometry,
 see also the essays by various authors in Bioesmat-Martagon 2011.)
Projective geometry has its own foundational problem, akin to that of
distance in Euclidean geometry, which concerns the concept of
cross-ratio, and we need to follow the moves to create projective
geometry as an independent subject, to define cross-ratio in this
setting, and to resolve the epistemological issues that are raised (an
achievement associated with Klein's Erlangen Programme). We
shall also see that the growth of projective geometry creates the
arena for Hilbert's axiomatisation of geometry.



The origins of this geometric theory lay in the 17th century, with
Desargues and Pascal, but plane projective geometry took a particular
boost from Jean Victor Poncelet's book of 1822 *Traite
des proprietes projectives des figures* where he
showed the power of projective methods under the provocative
formulation of non-metrical geometry. The fundamental character of the
new geometry resides in the way it can be thought of as capturing the
simplest properties of the straight line--two distinct points
define a unique line, two distinct lines meet in at most one
point--while discarding the metrical concepts of distance and
angle.



Poncelet's claims for transformations of the plane that map
lines to lines were rewritten by Chasles (1837) in a more rigorous way
that highlighted the invariance of cross-ratio. Consider \(AB\) to
represent the distance between the two points. The cross-ratio of four
points \(A\), \(B\), \(C\), \(D\) on a line is defined to be
\(AB{\cdot}CD \mathbin{/} AD{\cdot}CB\), and if the points are mapped
to \(A'\), \(B'\), \(C'\), \(D'\) respectively by a projective
transformation, then

 

\[ \frac{AB\cdot CD}{AD\cdot CB} = \frac{A'B'\cdot C'D'}{A'D'\cdot C'B'}. \]


However, this left the subject in the uncomfortable position of
seeming to be more general than Euclidean geometry, because Euclidean,
metrical, transformations are projective transformations but not
conversely, while still seeming to rely on a metrical concept in the
definition of its fundamental invariant.



This issue was tackled in the 1840s and 1850s by Georg Karl Christian
von Staudt. His two books (1847, 1856-1860) attempted to give
foundations for projective geometry that made it an autonomous
subject, independent of Euclidean geometry. They were hard to read,
and imperfect in a number of ways, but the task of creating a rigorous
theory could be seen for the first time as a matter of completing a
task already begun. Von Staudt argued that the transformations of
plane projective geometry could map any triple of collinear points to
any other, and any quadruple of points (no three of which were
collinear) to any other, but not any quadruple of collinear points to
any other. He then made a detailed study of collinear quadruples. He
also made brief remarks about how Euclidean geometry could be obtained
from projective geometry, and from these it could be seen that his
theory of collinear quadruples reduced to the familiar theory of
cross-ratio as soon as the concept of Euclidean distance was added to
projective geometry. This insight was made clear and explicit by Felix
Klein in a number of papers in the early 1870s. The first readable
textbook on projective geometry, and the one that gave it its name,
was Cremona's *Elementi di geometria projettiva* of 1873,
and after that the subject swiftly rose to become the fundamental
classical geometry.



Its basic concepts were the points, lines, and planes of a space that
was \(\mathbb{R}^3\) enriched with what was often called a plane at
infinity, so that any two coplanar lines meet. Prior to
axiomatisations of the theory at the end of the 19th
century, point, line, and plane were basic concepts with an intuitive
interpretation that allowed for a ready passage between projective and
Euclidean geometry. The allowed transformations of the geometry map
points to points, lines to lines, and planes to planes and preserve
cross-ratio. They act transitively on the space, so no point, line, or
plane is special, and therefore lines that are parallel in any finite
part of the space may be mapped to intersecting lines and vice
versa.



In its synthetic form the successes of projective geometry were
largely confined to the simplification it brought to the study of
conics--all non-degenerate conics (the circle, ellipse, parabola,
and hyperbola) are projectively equivalent. In its algebraic form
projective geometry proved itself almost essential in the study of
plane algebraic curves of any degree, and, extended to projective
spaces of higher dimensions, to the study of algebraic surfaces. All
this contributed to the central importance attributed to a
non-metrical geometry based on little more than the concept of the
straight line and on the incidence properties of lines and planes.



Projective geometry also possessed one startling feature, called
duality, which stimulated epistemological reflections on its possible
source. In plane projective geometry it is possible to exchange the
terms 'point' and 'line',
'coincident' and 'concurrent' and in this way
obtain from a valid statement a new one. As a result all definitions,
theorems, and proofs in projective geometry have a dual character. The
dual of the statement of Desargues' theorem and its proof, for
example, is the converse of the theorem and its proof. In three
dimensions, the terms 'point' and 'plane' can
be exchanged in the same way, leaving 'lines'
unchanged. This raises intriguing epistemological issues: duality was
regarded by Cremona as a law of logic; also, it is easy to conceive of
the plane as made up of points, but impossible to regard it
intuitively as made up of lines. To make matters worse, space is
three-dimensional when regarded as made up of points, but
four-dimensional when made up of lines.


### 3.1 Coordinate transformations; Kleinian geometry



Klein's Erlangen Programme and what has become known as the
Kleinian view of geometry is described in the entry,
 Nineteenth Century Geometry.
 It has come to stand as the principal source of the view that
geometry can be defined as a group acting on a space, and a
geometrical property is any property invariant under all the
transformations of the appropriate group.



Klein advocated this view in a pamphlet published when he became a
Professor at the University of Erlangen in 1872 and other publications
in journals in the 1870s in order to re-unify geometry. He presented a
way of showing that metrical geometries, such as Euclidean and
non-Euclidean geometry, and other geometries, such as inversive
geometry and birational geometry, can be regarded as special cases of
projective geometry (as can affine geometry, which he did not know
about in 1872).



The fundamental geometry was real projective geometry, say in two
dimensions. In this geometry the space is real projective space, and
the group is the group of all projective transformations. Such a
transformation maps points to points, lines to lines, curves of degree
\(n\) to curves of degree \(n\), and, importantly, the cross-ratio of
four collinear points is left unaltered by any projective
transformation. In the Kleinian viewpoint, this establishes that
points, lines, curves of degree \(n\), and the cross-ratio of four
collinear points are properties of the geometry.



Projective geometry incorporated the other geometries in a variety of
ways. Klein indicated that one may seek to add to the list of
configurations, in which case the group that keeps them invariant will
generally be smaller than the principal group, or one may seek to
enlarge the group, in which case the class of invariant configurations
will generally shrink. Klein succeeded in showing that non-Euclidean
geometry arises as a sub-geometry by confining attention to the
interior of a conic in projective space and to the subgroup that maps
the interior of that conic to itself (see Klein 1871, 1873).



The epistemological character of Klein's Erlangen Programme
becomes clearer when one looks at how it resolved the well-known
nagging doubt about the definition of cross-ratio in projective
geometry. Klein's answer proceeded by analogy with lengths in
Euclidean or non-Euclidean geometry. In those geometries, the
corresponding group preserves straight lines, and any point can be
mapped to any other point, but there is no transformation in the group
that can map a line segment onto a proper sub-segment of itself. Any
arbitrary but fixed line segment (determined by two points) can
therefore be taken as unit of length and used to measure line
segments, by constructing arbitrary multiples and sub-multiples of it
and arranging them as one would a ruler. Now to measure the length of
a segment \(AB\), one simply lays the point \(A\) at one end of the
ruler and sees where the point \(B\) falls on the ruler.



Klein's insight, following von Staudt, was that an exactly
similar argument involving quadruples of collinear points can be used
to define cross-ratio in projective geometry. The projective group
preserves straight lines, and any ordered triple of collinear points
can be mapped to any ordered triple of collinear points, and the map
that sends a given ordered triple of distinct points to another
ordered triple of distinct points is unique, but there is no
transformation in the group that can map a quadruple of four collinear
points onto an arbitrary such quadruple. Any arbitrary but fixed
collinear quadruple can therefore be taken as unit of
'size', and a complicated but not difficult argument
allows one to produce arbitrary multiples and sub-multiples of it that
can be used to measure cross-ratios, by arranging as one would a
ruler. Rather than give the details, it is better to give this
suggestive illustration of why this can be done. Let the cross-ratio
of the four collinear points \(P\), \(Q\), \(R\), \(S\) be measured by
mapping the points onto the points \(A\), \(B\), \(C\), \(D\) on the
real line, where \(A\) is at the origin, \(C\) at \(\infty\), and
\(D\) at 1, so it is the position of \(B\) that determines the
cross-ratio. This is uniquely determined, and if the length of \(AB\)
is \(x\), we find that \(AB{.}CD \mathbin{/} AD{.}CB = x\).



In the language of the time, length is a two-point invariant of the
Euclidean or non-Euclidean group, and cross-ratio is a four-point
invariant of the projective group.


### 3.2 Hilbert and others on axiomatic projective geometry



Problems with some technical issues in projective geometry, and the
rising standards of rigour at the end of the 19th century
provoked attempts to axiomatise the subject. The task was taken up by
Moritz Pasch, and most energetically by Italian geometers Pieri,
Peano, and others in the second half of the 19th century,
and they succeeded in giving a rigorous account of real and complex
projective geometry in two and three dimensions (see Marchisotto and
Smith 2007). But they managed at the same time to reduce the subject
to a rigorous training for geometry teachers, and did not appreciate
the avenues for research that they had opened. It was left to David
Hilbert to revitalise the axiomatic approach to geometry (see Hallett
and Majer 2004).



Hilbert had been introduced to a number of controversies about
elementary projective geometry that concerned what results in what
settings implied what other results. The most notable concerned
Desargues's theorem (see Arana and Mancosu 2012). In
3-dimensional projective geometry, Desargues's theorem is a
consequence of the incidence axioms alone, but it is a theorem about
points and lines in a projective plane (and so in 2-dimensional
geometry) yet no-one had been able to derive it from the incidence
axioms of 2-dimensional projective geometry. It had come to be
suspected that it might not be deducible from those axioms alone, and
Giuseppe Peano was able to show that indeed it could not be deduced
without some extra assumptions. Independently, Hilbert also gave an
example of a geometry meeting all the incidence axioms of
2-dimensional projective geometry but in which Desargues's
theorem was false. It was replaced by the simpler example found by the
American mathematician and astronomer F.R. Moulton in all later
editions of Hilbert's *Grundlagen der Geometrie*
(1899).



In the axiomatic geometries that Hilbert put forward, the fundamental
objects (points, lines, planes) are not defined. Instead, Hilbert
specified the network of relations that links them, which determines
how they can be used and what can be said about them. He presented
five families of axioms, sorted according to the concepts they
codified. He then created a variety of geometries obeying a variety of
axioms systems, and established the consistency of them by giving them
coordinates over suitable rings and fields--often his geometries
admit many interpretations or models. Here Hilbert took advantage of
his expertise in the novel theories of number fields and rings. This
gave these geometries all the consistency of arithmetic, and increased
Hilbert's interest in attempts to ground arithmetic in some form
of set theory and logic.



Hilbert's approach thrived because he had come to realise that
there was a mathematics of axioms, a study of different but
inter-related axiom schemes and their implications, and of the axioms
and their possible interpretations (models). He employed this new
method to solve questions about independence and consistency, hoping
to find also new insights into simplicity, the solubility of
mathematical problems, and decidability. Poincare, in his
review (1902) of Hilbert's book, accepted the new geometries as
valid, but regretted that they were, as he put it, incomplete, because
they lacked a psychological component. By this he meant that they
could not be accommodated in his explanation of how we develop our
knowledge of the geometry of physical space on the basis of
experience (see section 6.2 below). 


## 4. Non-Euclidean geometry



Investigations of the parallel postulate began in Greek times,
continued in the Islamic world, and were undertaken in the early
modern West. But, for reasons which are still unclear, after around
1800 it became easier for people to imagine that Euclid's
*Elements* might not be the only possible system of metrical
geometry. Among the factors that can help explain how the unthinkable
became thinkable even outside the community of mathematicians was the
accumulation of theorems based on assumptions other than the parallel
postulate. It would seem that the production of novel, consistent
consequences of such a radical assumption, and the failure to find a
contradiction, inclined some people to contemplate that there might
indeed be a whole geometry different from Euclid's. It may also
be relevant that this process coincided with the full assimilation of
imaginary numbers (and the rise of complex function theory); indeed,
Lobachevskii called his theory "Imaginary geometry".



A change in attitudes can be noticed already by the late 18th century.
In 1759 d'Alembert called the problem of parallel lines
"le scandale des elements de
geometrie." In 1763, the dissertation of G. S.
Klugel examined a large number of attempts to prove the parallel
postulate, concluding that they were all faulty: the result can be
proven on the basis of axioms "that are not clearer or more
secure than Euclid's," and thus Euclid was indeed right to
include among the axioms "a proposition that cannot be
demonstrated in correct form." Klugel's discussion
called special attention to Saccheri's work (1733) as the most
detailed treatment in Modern times, and stimulated Lambert to do his
own detailed work on the topic (1786). Later on, in 1816, Gauss
restated in print that the constantly increasing number of attempts to
prove the postulate do not fill the gap, and that one should honestly
and openly admit that "in essence we have not come farther than
Euclid 2000 years ago."



Perhaps the signal example of this shift is the Law Professor F. K.
Schweikart, who in 1818 sent Gauss via Gerling, a colleague and former
student of his at the University of Marburg, an account of a geometry
quite different from Euclid's. Schweikart's geometry was
accepted by Gauss, who replied that all the properties of the new
geometry could be derived once a value was given for a constant that
appeared in Schweikart's account. But on what grounds Gauss
had accepted it, is less clear. As the years went by he came to be
entirely confident that there was a new, two-dimensional geometry
different from Euclidean plane geometry. This geometry could be
described by formulae that he, following Lambert, would have seen were
akin to those of spherical geometry. But he did not describe a
three-dimensional geometry of this kind, leaving open the possibility
that the two-dimensional geometry was some kind of formal, meaningless
oddity. On the other hand, in correspondence with Bessel he made it
clear that he could not ascribe to Euclidean geometry the certainty he
gave to arithmetic, which was a priori. Both he and Bessel kept open
the possibility that astronomical regions of space might fail to be
Euclidean.



Credit for the first fully mathematical descriptions of space in terms
other than Euclid's must go to Janos Bolyai in Hungary
and Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevskii in Russia independently. Bolyai in
his "*Appendix scientiam spatii absolute veram
exhibens*" (1832) and Lobachevskii in his *Neue
Anfangsgrunde der Geometrie* (1835) and again in his
*Geometrische Untersuchungen* (1840) replaced the parallel
postulate with the assumption that given a line L and a point not on
that line, there are many lines through the point that lie in the
plane defined by L and the given point, but that do not meet the line
L. Of these, as they then showed, one line in each direction is
asymptotic to L, and these asymptotic lines divide the family of all
the other lines in the given plane and through the given point into
two families: those that meet L, and those that do not. Much work then
followed, famously similar in each case, in particular to show that in
the three-dimensional space described by their assumptions there is a
surface upon which Euclidean geometry holds, and to deduce the
existence of trigonometrical formulae describing triangles in the
plane. These formulae resemble the corresponding formulae for
triangles on the sphere.



All this convinced both Bolyai and Lobachevskii that the new geometry
could be a description of physical space and it would henceforth be an
empirical task to decide whether Euclidean geometry or non-Euclidean
geometry was true. Lobachevskii even attempted to determine the matter
by astronomical observations, but there were significant
methodological difficulties and his results were utterly
inconclusive.



It is, of course, true, that no amount of consistent deductions in the
new geometry rules out the possibility that a contradiction does
exist, but the intriguing relationship of the new geometry to
spherical geometry, and the existence of trigonometric formulae for
triangles strongly suggested that the new geometry was at least
consistent. Those who did accept it, and they were very few before the
1860s, nonetheless may well have welcomed a better account than the
one Bolyai and Lobachevskii provided. Even so, many geometers were to
find the formulae convincing 'proofs' of the validity of
the new geometry even after the reformulations of Riemann and Beltrami
(for example, Enriques in his major essay (1907) on the principles of
geometry).



It is not just that there are formulae, but that they hint at an
alternative formulation of geometry, one in which the geometry
described in Euclid's *Elements* might prove to be but a
special case. If there could be another way to define geometry, one
that would lead to these formulae in various cases, the way would be
open to rethink all of the questions about geometry that critical
examination had opened. The person best placed to do this in the 1830s
and 1840s was Gauss: he knew very well what Bolyai and Lobachevskii
had done, and his differential geometry gave him the means to proceed,
but, curiously, he did not do so. In the early 1840s he wrote some
notes that show he could connect the new two-dimensional geometry with
geometry on a surface of constant negative curvature, but he did
nothing with this observation.



On the other hand, the mere existence of formulae would not suffice to
make them geometrical in character. This need to give them a
geometrical grounding was recognised by Lobachevskii in his earliest
publications, but being in Russian they were not read outside Russia
(nor were they appreciated by Russian mathematicians). He dropped his
considerations of this kind in his pamphlet of 1840, upon which much
of his reputation depends to this day, but brought them back in his
last presentation, the *Pangeometrie* (1856),
which, however, did no better than the earlier versions.



Lobachevskii argued firstly that geometry was a science of bodies in
space, and that space is three-dimensional. The most primitive concept
was that of contact, and its opposite, a cut separating two bodies.
Two bodies not in contact are separated and a suitable third body in
contact with both of them measures the distance between them -- a
concept that was otherwise undefined. With it, however, he could
define a sphere with its centre at a given point as the collection of
all points equidistant from that given point. He then showed how to
define a plane capturing the intuition that a plane is the collection
of points in space that lie the same distance from two given points.
In his terms, given two points, a plane is the set of points common to
two spheres of equal radius, one centred on one of the points and the
other on the other. A line can be defined similarly using circles on
the same plane.



With the intuition that distance is the primitive concept comes a
greater appreciation of motion, or at least the results of being able
to move objects around without altering them. One can imagine
transporting a rigid body around, say a cube with sides of unit
length, and using one of its sides to mark out lengths. We shall see
later that the possibilities inherent in this process occasioned a
chicken-and-egg debate between Bertrand Russell and Henri
Poincare at the end of the 19th century.



The new geometry posed a radical challenge to Euclidean geometry,
because it denied traditional geometry its best claim to certainty, to
wit, that it was the *only* logical system for discussing
geometry at all. It also exploited the tension known to experts
between the concepts of straightest and shortest. But in other ways it
was conventional. It offered no new definitions of familiar concepts
such as straightness or distance, it agreed with Euclidean geometry
over angles, it merely offered a different behaviour of parallel lines
based on a difference in the distant behaviour of straight lines. Its
proponents did not offer a sceptical conclusion. Bolyai and
Lobachevskii did not say: "See, there are two logical but
incompatible geometries, so we can never know what is true."
Instead, they held out the hope that experiments and observations
would decide. The epistemological price people would have to pay if
astronomical observations had come down in favour of the new geometry
would, in a sense, have been slight: it would have been necessary to
say that straight lines have an unexpected property after all, but one
only detectable at very long distances. To be sure, many of the
theorems of geometry would then have to be reworked, and their
familiar Euclidean counterparts would appear only as very good
approximations. But that is broadly comparable to the situation
Newtonian mechanics found itself in after the advent of special
relativity.


## 5. Riemannian geometry



The much more significant change came with the arrival of Bernhard
Riemann's great extension of Gaussian differential geometry.
Precisely, he found a way to define geometries starting from very
general concepts, and gradually leading (through more and more narrow
hypotheses) to the known metric geometries. At the risk of sounding
anachronistic, it can be argued that Riemann's
"conceptual" style of work is a form of
proto-structuralism. What he does is this: first, he introduces the
general structure of n-dimensional manifold, to then define a metric
in the manifold (with the means of differential geometry, line element
and Gaussian curvature). With all this in place, Euclidean and
non-Euclidean geometries emerge as particular cases of 3-dimensional
manifolds, concrete forms of the general structure. And the
"hypothesis" that singles out these geometries, within the
general framework of Riemannian manifolds, is the physical assumption
that rigid bodies can move freely without deformation.



Some of the epistemological issues are already raised with
Gauss's work (1828), so we turn to it first. Euler had shown
long before that, at each point *P* in a (smooth) surface, there
are two so-called *principal curvatures*, the maximum and the
minimum curvature of lines passing through *P*. These curvatures,
\(\kappa\_{1}\) and \(\kappa\_{2}\), occur in plane sections
perpendicular to each other and allow us to study the shape of the
entire neighborhood of *P*. Now, Gauss's deep idea (which remarkably he
found while working on geodesy, i.e., surveying and mapmaking) was
that some properties of curved surfaces can be studied without regard
for the ambient space. And one of these key properties is the product
\(\kappa\_{1}\kappa\_{2}\), called the Gaussian curvature of the surface
(at a point). Thus, employing methods of differential analysis, he
elaborated what is called an *intrinsic* geometry of surfaces. 


 Gauss worked with coordinate systems *within* the surface
itself, and considered the distance between points on the surface *S*
along lines contained entirely in *S*. Now, some surfaces
\(S\_1\), \(S\_2\) can be obtained from each other by bending (without
stretching); expressed more formally, there is an *isometric* map
from \(S\_1\) to \(S\_2\), which means that the points on
\(S\_1\) are assigned points in \(S\_2\) so that distances within the
surface \(S\_1\) are the same as the distances of the corresponding
points in \(S\_2\). (For instance, a plane can be so bent to form of
cylinder; you may use a piece of paper to convince yourself.) And
Gauss made the remarkable discovery that the Gaussian curvature of a
surface is an intrinsic property that remains invariant under
isometric mappings. He was so happy about this result that he called
it *theorema eggregium*, his 'outstanding theorem':
if two surfaces \(S\_1\), \(S\_2\) are isometric, then corresponding
points have the same Gaussian curvature. 



The fact that the Gaussian curvature of a surface at a point is
intrinsic means that it is entirely determined by measurements
*in* the surface and does not involve any question of a third
dimension or the ambient space embedding the surface. The property of
Gaussian curvature does not depend on how the surface is located in
space, but only on intrinsic properties of its metrics. That is to
say, important properties of curved surfaces remain invariant even if
one bends the surface isometrically (without breaking, stretching, or
folding it up). One such thing that remains invariant is the
*geodesics* on the surface, i.e., the lines of shortest distance
(lying entirely on the surface). In the case of a cylinder, the
geodesics are the vertical lines, horizontal lines (circles), and
helices around it --and these lines all come from straight lines
on the plane that is 'rolled up' to form the cylinder. 



Given a metric, a differential formula for the distance *ds*
between neighboring points (which is everywhere the same), the
curvature can be found. If, for example, the formula for distance is
that for a map of the sphere on the plane, the curvature will be found
to be the reciprocal of the square of the radius of the sphere
\(1/R^2\). A plane has the same Gaussian curvature as a cylinder, or
also as something close to a cone (that one may form from a cylinder,
without breaking, stretching, or folding); they are locally isometric;
although curved, the cylinder has zero curvature in Gauss's
technical sense, just as does the plane, which is why printing from a
rotating drum is possible. Gauss investigated when one surface can be
mapped onto another in such a way that distances are not altered,
showing that a necessary condition for this to happen is that the
curvatures at corresponding points are the same. And this also implies
that the same figures can be constructed on all of these surfaces; the
minimal lines or curves of shortest length between two points
(geodesics) on one surface correspond to those on the others, so that
angles, areas, etc. will be the same. Gauss had found a deeper way to
look into the geometry of a surface, and this gave birth to modern
differential geometry.



It was not immediately appreciated that Gauss's approach allowed
mathematicians to define surfaces as regions of the plane with a
particular metric that are not to be obtained from surfaces in
Euclidean 3-dimensional space. If one defines a surface as
the image of a map from a piece of \(\mathbb{R}^2\) to
\(\mathbb{R}^3\), then of course it is in \(\mathbb{R}^3\). But if one
defines a surface as a region of \(\mathbb{R}^2\) with a particular
metric, then there may be no surface in \(\mathbb{R}^3\) to which it
corresponds. The first person to appreciate this seems to have been
Riemann, who also extended this idea to any number of dimensions.


### 5.1 Riemann's generalisation



Riemann's ideas were both profound and naive, and for that
reason they proved difficult to make precise, but we can content
ourselves with being naive initially. He supposed he was given a
space (he called it a 'manifold') in which one can at any
point impose a coordinate system at least on all points near to an
arbitrary initial point, and if \(n\) numbers are needed to specify
the location of a point he said that the space is \(n\)-dimensional.
We can think of this process as providing a map of at least that part
of the space near the initial point onto \(\mathbb{R}^n\). Riemann was
very aware of the difference between local and global determinations,
and this became one of the keys to his new ideas: the same local
conditions are compatible with numerous different global
configurations.



He then supposed there was a means of saying what the distance was
infinitesimally, by generalising the formula for \(ds\) from 2 to
\(n\) variables. (He even allowed that entirely different formulae be
used, but we shall not describe that part of his theory, which lay
fallow for many years). Next, he generalized the intrinsic property of
curvature to higher dimensions; essentially, the \(n\)-dimensional
object has lots of 2-dimensional surfaces to which the Gaussian theory
applies, so a notion of curvature of a \(n\)-dimensional object at a
point can be derived from a consideration of the 2-dimensional
surfaces that pass through the point.



There are properties of the space that are independent of the
coordinate system. If two different coordinate systems give out
different coordinates, but in such a way that the distance between the
points is preserved, then either system gives us the same geometry,
and we find that the two agree on the curvatures at each point, on
distances, and so forth. Yet the framework of differential geometry
proposed by Riemann is very flexible and general. He found that it
allowed not only for alternatives to Euclidean geometry, but even for
geometries where the generalized curvature does change from point to
point. Initially this was scarcely taken up, and most authors focused
on geometries of *constant curvature*. As Riemann explained, his
framework allowed for geometries of negative curvature (this is the
Lobachevskii-Bolyai case), of positive curvature (a new kind, often
called elliptic geometry, or 'Riemannian' in a narrow
sense), and also of zero curvature (Euclidean).



Because the formula for \(ds\) was written down subject to only a
few restrictions, there is no reason to believe that a Riemannian
geometry is defined with respect to an antecedent Euclidean geometry.
There is no claim that an \(n\)-dimensional Riemannian geometry is to
be obtained by a map from an \(n\)-dimensional subset of some
Euclidean \(m\)-dimensional space. This means that geometry
can be done without reference to any Euclidean geometry. Euclidean
geometry is no longer epistemologically prior to any study of other
geometries. The reign of Euclid
was--theoretically--over.



Given a concept of distance on a manifold it is possible to talk about
geodesics--a geodesic being a curve of shortest length between
two points. Existence and uniqueness questions can be raised, and
often answered. A significant advance was made independently by Tullio
Levi-Civita in 1917 and Hermann Weyl in 1918, inspired by
Einstein's theory of general relativity, when they showed how to
define parallelism on a curved manifold (on Levi-Civita's
contribution, see Bottazzini 1999 and on Weyl's contribution see
Scholz 2001). Roughly speaking, in Weyl's presentation (1918),
two vectors at different points are parallel if they belong to a
family of vectors along a curve that do not vary along the curve. This
became referred to as a way of establishing a connection between
different points, and the theory was called the theory of connections
on manifolds. One can ask if a family of tangent vectors to a curve is
composed of vectors parallel to the tangent vector at the starting
point: if so, the curve is a natural candidate to be considered the
straightest curve between its end points, because the tangent vector
never accelerates along the curve. In modern differential geometry,
geodesics are defined via connections.


### 5.2 Riemann and Beltrami and rigorous non-Euclidean geometry



Riemann's "*Uber die Hypothesen* ..."
(given as a lecture in 1854, published posthumously in 1868) and
Beltrami's "*Saggio di interpretazione*"
(1868) gave different but equivalent accounts of 2-dimensional
non-Euclidean geometry. Beltrami employed differential geometry to
justify the hyperbolic geometry of Lobachevskii-Bolyai. By studying
the pseudosphere and how it can be mapped onto the plane (in such a
way that its geodesics went to straight lines), Beltrami realized that
the unit disk can be viewed as an 'infinite plane'. It had
been impossible to find a surface in \(\mathbb{R}^3\) that behaved
like the hyperbolic plane (the closest, but partial, being the
pseudosphere); now it was possible to realize non-Euclidean geometry
as the geometry of the interior of a disk with a novel metric. The
disk is the whole 'plane', its circumference a line at
infinity, line segments in the disk are 'lines', and one
can define a distance function
\(d(P,Q)\) that makes sense and validates Lobachevskii's
results. From the logical point of view, this was an enormous step
forward, as the consistency of non-Euclidean geometry was now
proven.



Riemann's account, which was stated in \(n\) dimensions, agrees
with the one that Poincare was to use in many short
publications in 1880 and 1881 but only describe explicitly in his
major paper (Poincare 1882). In this so-called
*conformal* model, the plane is again a disk, geodesics are
arcs of circles perpendicular to the boundary of the disk and angles
are true (Euclidean). The Riemann and Beltrami disks swiftly persuaded
mathematicians that the non-Euclidean geometry of Bolyai and
Lobachevskii did, after all, make rigorous mathematical sense.
Poincare's contribution a decade later was to make
non-Euclidean geometry the natural geometry for certain topics
elsewhere in mathematics, chiefly the developing and important subject
of Riemann surfaces.



The importance of a rigorous account of any part of mathematics should
not be ignored, but the acceptance of non-Euclidean and Riemannian
geometries went beyond the presentation of a consistent formalism. It
marks the acceptance of the abstract view that geometry is whatever
can be described in the Riemannian formalism: one has a very general
framework, allowing for a dizzying number of concrete specifications.
Thus the door was opened to the view that there are many geometries,
each of which must be consistent, and none of which need to refer to
Euclidean space, however intuitive this may be. (A parallel
development with similar outcome happened in the context of projective
geometry with Klein's work.) The number of dimensions of the
'space' under discussion, and the precise metric can be
modified at will (in due course, the topological character of that
'space' would be treated similarly). There is a
2-dimensional geometry of such-and-such a kind because a suitable
metric can be found; because there is, as it were, a map of it, not
because a surface has been found in \(\mathbb{R}^3\) with the right
properties. Indeed, it was later shown (Hilbert 1901) that there is no
surface in \(\mathbb{R}^3\) corresponding precisely to non-Euclidean
2-dimensional space.



Riemann was clear that the epistemological implications of this way of
doing geometry were immense. His lecture was a happy combination of
mathematics, philosophy and physics (Ferreiros 2006). Mathematicians
should no longer need to abstract some fundamental intuitions from
what they believe about physical space, such as the nature and
properties of straight lines or circles, and seek to build a true
geometry on the basis of some axiomatic expression of those
intuitions. Rather, the direction of thought should go in the opposite
direction: mathematicians were free to consider infinitely many
geometries. Riemann speculated about the validity of the hypotheses of
geometry "in the infinitely small" being possibly bound up with the
physical forces. Scientists could now freely investigate which
geometry is best for the mathematical explanation of empirical facts.
He envisioned the abandonment of the Newtonian conception of
phenomena, "by making in this conception the successive changes
required by facts which it cannot explain." His purely conceptual
(mathematical) research would be useful "in preventing this work from
being hampered by too narrow views, and progress in knowledge of the
interdependence of things from being checked by traditional
prejudices." In this connection, it was soon shown that it is possible
to do theoretical mechanics in the setting of non-Euclidean
geometry.


## 6. The intelligibility of the new geometries



The epistemological significance of projective geometry rests on its
implications for the nature and rigour of classical geometry. The
epistemological significance of non-Euclidean geometry rests more on
the possibility that it could be true in whatever way that Euclidean
geometry could be true. We therefore turn to 19th century
examinations of the intelligibility of geometry.



But first a word of warning. The logical fact that non-Euclidean
geometry turned out to be consistent (relative to Euclidean geometry,
or to real analysis) does not per se establish the invalidity of the
Kantian viewpoint. Kant's views are compatible with the existence of
logical alternatives to Euclidean geometry; after all, he was arguing
about space as an intuition, not about mere conceptual possibilities;
he was not a Leibnizian, and denied that geometry is analytic. If
anything, a Kantian would expect that the alternative geometries are
only an intellectual possibility, and that we cannot visualize them
intuitively. A sophisticated elaboration of such a standpoint was
Frege's in his famous correspondence with Hilbert (see the entry on the
 Frege-Hilbert controversy).
 But it's true that most of the relevant authors chose a different
line of thought and abandoned the Kantian position.


### 6.1 Herbart's philosophy and Riemann



Johann Friedrich Herbart became Kant's successor in
Konigsberg in 1808, where he remained until going to
Gottingen in 1833, but he was no orthodox Kantian. His major
work, the two-volume *Psychologie als Wissenschaft neu gegrundet
auf Erfahrung, Metaphysik, und Mathematik* of 1824-1825,
sought to establish psychology as a science, based on experience and
metaphysics. Using some rather fanciful mathematics he endeavoured to
show how memory works and how repeated stimuli of certain kinds cause
the mind to learn to perceive, for example, lines, parallel lines,
intersecting lines, and surfaces. There are no innate ideas, in
Herbart's opinion; visual space is constructed from experience,
most significantly by means of the conceptual act of inferring
continuity in spatial processes. And concepts are generated by
clusters of memories, upon which logic then operates independently of
their origins. This was Herbart's way of avoiding grounding
logic in psychology.



Herbart's ideas influenced Riemann (see Scholz 1982). Riemann
regarded natural science as the attempt to understand nature by the
use of precise concepts, which are to be modified in the light of new
experiences. He expected the most successful concepts to be quite
abstract, and agreed with Herbart that they are not a priori in the
Kantian fashion. It was their origin in observation or experiment that
gave these concepts their significance for science, but Riemann
allowed for a constant process of corroboration and revision. In notes
he wrote for himself (see Riemann *Werke* 1990: 539) Riemann
said that he agreed with Herbart in matters of psychology and
epistemology, but not ontology or with his ideas about the
construction of the concepts of space, time, and motion. The
disagreement masks a deeper sympathy. Herbart had advocated a
three-dimensional real world of causally connected but discrete
'monads' (with windows, to use Leibniz's phrase), which the mind
treats via the concept of a continuum, which it supplies, thereby
turning its discrete experiences into spectra of possibilities.
Riemann saw no reason to restrict attention to three dimensions, and
moved the continuous spectra of possibilities into the very general
geometrical concepts he was creating.



This diminished the role of experience that Herbart had emphasised.
Riemann was making conscious what Herbart had said occurred naturally:
if intellectual reflection generates concepts with which we frame the
world, in reaction to our experiences, then, said Riemann, let
mathematics generate more precise and flexible concepts with which to
conduct science. At the end of his lecture he explored possibilities
for the application of the new geometries, especially at an atomic
level, and he argued that his task had been to expand the range of
theoretical options, eliminating prejudices.


### 6.2 Helmholtz and Poincare



Riemann's ideas in turn influenced Hermann von Helmholtz, who
published several influential essays on how our knowledge of geometry
is possible. In his "*On the factual [thatsachlichen]
foundations of geometry*" (1866) he endeavoured to show how
only a limited number of Riemannian geometries can be constructed in
which there is a concept of rigid body motion. He argued that it is
our experience of rigid bodies that teaches us what space is like, and
in particular what distance is. He further claimed that a
2-dimensional space that admits rigid body motions would either be the
Euclidean plane or the sphere. Beltrami wrote to him to point out that
he had overlooked the possibility of non-Euclidean geometry, and
Helmholtz not only agreed, but wrote a further essay (1868) in which
he explained how it would be possible for us to have knowledge of this
geometry at an intuitive level (thus giving the lie to followers of
Kant). Many Kantians refused to be convinced, but one person that
these ideas (and Riemann's) very likely influenced was Henri
Poincare (see Gray 2012).



As soon as Poincare began to write his popular philosophical
essays about geometry, he made it clear that his chief concern was
with how we could rely on any geometry at all. Mathematical advances
were the basis for his reflections, but the key question was about the
epistemological status of the hypotheses on which geometry is founded.
And here he could not agree with Kant, nor Helmholtz, nor with
Riemann. He was well aware of the great range of Riemannian
geometries, and of the conclusion of Helmholtz's speculations,
by then made rigorous in the work of Sophus Lie, that a very limited
number of geometries admitted rigid body motions. His concern in his
"On the foundations of geometry" (1898) was with
epistemology.



Poincare argued that the mind quickly realises that it can
compensate for certain kinds of motions that it sees. If a glass comes
towards you, you can walk backwards in such a way that the glass seems
unaltered. You can do the same if it tilts or rotates. We come to
master a store of these compensating motions, and we realise that we
can follow one with another and the result will be a third
compensating motion. On this basis we come to distinguish
displacements (both our bodily displacements and displacements of
objects) from other kinds of change, i.e., alterations for which we
cannot generate compensating motions, such as the motion of the wine
in the glass as it swirls around, or a change in its colour. Most
importantly, the displacements form a mathematical structure called a
group. In this way the mind comes to form the concept of a rigid body
motion, and we elaborate a clear conceptual understanding of space on
the basis of the group of motions.



Poincare then considered what group the group of compensating
motions could be, and found that, as Lie had proved in his study of
the Riemann-Helmholtz problem of space, there was a strictly limited
collection of such groups. Chief among them were the groups that come
from Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry, and as abstract groups they
are different. But which one was correct?



Poincare's controversial view was that one could never
know, or better, than none was simply "true". Human beings, through
evolution and through our experience as infants, pick the Euclidean
group and so we say that space is Euclidean. Our bodies are quite
rigid, our motions are rigid motions, and this is decisive. Another
species, drawing on different experiences, could pick the
non-Euclidean group and so say that space was non-Euclidean. If we met
such a species, there would be no experiment that would decide the
issue.



Of course, one can make experiments using large triangles and
measuring the angles, as Lobachevskii, Riemann and others had
suggested. To maximize dimensions, assume that the sides of the
triangle are made by rays of light. Now, suppose that within the
limits of experimental error the result of the experiment is that the
angle sum of the triangle is less that \(\pi\), a result consistent
with non-Euclidean geometry but inconsistent with Euclidean geometry.
The only conclusion one can draw, said Poincare, is that either
light rays travel along straight lines and space is non-Euclidean, or
that space is Euclidean and light rays travel along curves.



We can summarise his argument this way. Our knowledge of the geometry
of the external world is founded on our basic physical experiences,
which lead to our mental ability to deal with a group of rigid body
motions. There is a very limited store of these groups, but no
experiment can decide between them. All we can do is make a choice,
and we shall choose the simplest one. As it happens, that was the
Euclidean group, because, said Poincare, we had found that one
of its properties not shared with the non-Euclidean group
(corresponding to the parallel postulate), was particularly simple.
But the human species had, as it were, made a choice, and that choice
was now innate in the human mind. Because of the way knowledge is
acquired and the fact that there is more than one appropriate group,
one can never know whether space is Euclidean or non-Euclidean, only
that we construct it as Euclidean.



This twist on the Kantian doctrine of the unknowability of the
*Ding an sich* (the thing in itself) and our confinement to the
world of appearances, was congenial to Poincare as a working
physicist. Even though he agreed with Riemann to a large extent,
Riemann had hoped that empirical matters would guide the choice of
geometry, while Poincare could not agree. The viewpoint just
explained is Poincare's philosophy of geometrical
conventionalism. But there is an important distinction to make. Notice
that this is not like the conventionality of words, but rather like
social or legal conventions (where some basic facts have to be taken
into account, see De Paz 2018). The situation is far from total
arbitrariness, since physical experience plays a decisive role and
restricts the choice; but there is no absolute determination either,
in the end a choice has to be made, and simplicity has the final
word.



He advocated conventionalism in other areas of science too, arguing
that what we call the laws of nature (Newton's laws, e.g., the
principle of inertia) are neither empirical matters open to revision
nor absolute truths but are well established results that have been
elevated to the role of axioms in present scientific theories. They
could be challenged, but only if a whole scientific theory was being
challenged, not idly when some awkward observations were made. Faced
with a satellite that did not seem to be obeying Newton's laws
one should, said Poincare, consider some as-yet unnoticed force
at work and not seek to re-write Newton. But a new theory can be
proposed, based on different assumptions that rewrite a law of nature,
because these laws are not eternal truths--we could never know
such things. And if a new law were to be proposed, simplicity and not
only empirical fit will be taken into account as one chooses between
the new and the old.



The crucial distinction here is that scientific conventionalism
operates at a high level. The choices are made consciously and
intellectually, the debate is only open to people with a considerable
amount of specialised education. On the other hand, the choice of
Euclidean geometry operates in the mind before it is capable of any
kind of formal instruction; without *some* geometric framework,
the unfortunate subject would be incapable of any knowledge of the
external world.


### 6.3 Poincare versus Russell



Poincare's views brought him into collision with Bertrand
Russell in the 1890s when he was emerging from his brief Hegelian
phase and entering his Kantian phase. Russell was trying to establish
the Kantian a priori by arguing that there is one fundamental
geometry, which is projective geometry, and we have synthetic a priori
knowledge of it (see Griffin 1991 on Russell and Nabonnand 2000 on the
controversy).



There can be little doubt that Poincare, with his much greater
command of mathematics, won much of the debate, as Russell, with his
characteristic willingness to admit his errors, was willing to
concede. But a significant difference of approach between them was
never to be resolved. Poincare's analysis began with
rigid bodies and their motions, from which a concept of distance is
created. Russell argued on the contrary, that whatever we may discover
the concept of distance to be, we know before we begin that the
distance from London to Paris is more than a metre. This
Poincare denied in his "*Des fondements de la
geometrie: a propos d'un livre de M.
Russell*" (1899).



In Poincare's view, we only know the distance from
one point to another on the basis of experience with rigid bodies, and
this knowledge has become innate in us. In Russell's view,
distance is to be regarded as a fundamental intuition, and if some
contemplated that the distance from London to Paris could be less than
a metre, we would know we could not be talking about distance. But
Poincare insisted that talk of what we know should always be
dependent on how we know it; without that, the claims were not
knowledge claims at all.



A mathematical illustration may illuminate the disagreement. For
Poincare, talk about what we might call ordinary geometry, the
sense of space that we have prior to advanced instruction, is really
about the ability we have to measure things. We can carry a rigid body
around, and use it as a ruler. It is because we can do that that we
can speak of the distance between places. If you want to make the
set-up more abstract, there must be a space and a group that acts on
the space and moves points in the space around. If this group has the
property that however a region of that space is moved around it is
never mapped onto a proper subset of itself then one can construct
rigid bodies and talk about distance.



For Russell, one is free to take a space and assign a
'distance' to each pair of points (subject to some simple
conditions which we omit). Relative to this sense of distance, one can
say if, as a region is moved around, points in it remain the same
distance apart or not. We have done this for our sense of distance on
the surface of the Earth, and we can do this whether or not we also
have some rigid body motions. In mathematical terms, Russell would be
happy with what is called a metric space. The point is not that one
could impose a metric on the surface of the Earth in which a
particular pair of points, say in Cambridge, were a metre apart and
London and Paris were only half a metre apart--one
could--but that one can talk about distance without presupposing
the action of a group. Some metric spaces admit the action of groups
that preserve distance, others do not, but distance can be defined
without talking about a group. Poincare was never confronted
with exactly this argument--metric spaces are an invention of the
20th century--but we know what he would have said. He
would have said that it was valid mathematics but entirely formal and
could not be considered as genuine knowledge because it lacked a
psychophysical dimension. We know this because it was his criticism of
the axiomatic geometries constructed by Hilbert (see below).



Poincare's arguments also met with objections from the
Italian mathematician Federigo Enriques. Poincare had argued
that one way to see the validity of the geometrical conventionalist
argument was to consider a disc in which everything was made of the
same material, which expanded as it heated, and in which the
temperature was a particular function of the distance of the centre of
the disc. This function, which Poincare specified, ensured that
the metric in the disc, as measured by rods made of the same material
as the disc, was that of non-Euclidean geometry. Creatures living in
the disc would report that their space was non-Euclidean; we would
reply that their space was Euclidean but subject to the distorting
effect of a temperature field. Plainly each side can maintain their
position free of self-contradiction.



Enriques argued, in his book *Problemi della Scienza* (1906),
that this was unreasonable. The creatures would be right to ascribe a
geometry to their space (and, indeed, non-Euclidean geometry) because
the distorting force is beyond their control. Their geodesics are
built in to the space, and it would be unreasonable of them to ascribe
the paths of geodesics to the operation of a 'force'
because that 'force' was not something they could even in
principle manipulate. Heat, the gravitational effect of massive
objects, all these distorting influences are things that can be
allowed for, because they can be changed. If, in the experiment above,
it were to be claimed that space is Euclidean but our candidates for
straight lines are deformed it should be possible to vary the degree
of deformation. One might conduct the experiment further away from any
massive objects, in emptier regions of space. If different experiments
gave even slightly different results one would, in accordance with
Poincare's own criteria for changing scientific
conventions, look for something in the circumstances that was
responsible for the deviation of the light rays from straightness. But
if no experiment were to show any difference, Enriques argued that it
would be rational to conclude that light rays travelled on geodesics
and the geometry of space was non-Euclidean.



It is worth noticing that the growing sophistication of ideas about
how theoretical geometry relates to practical experience, and about
the nature of the knowledge that geometry supplies, belong to a family
of changes across all of mathematics by 1900. An autonomous discipline
of mathematics emerged that placed an increasing emphasis on formal
aspects of the subject and offered a complicated and often distant
relationship with the world of experience. This modernist turn in
mathematics is discussed in various places (see Gray 2008 and the
literature cited there).


## 7. Concluding remarks



This essay has examined the main branches in the development of
geometry until the early years of the 20th century under
the headings of theoretical or abstract knowledge, empirical and other
analyses of the intelligibility of such knowledge, and the deductive
character of that knowledge.



The status of the straight line in elementary Euclidean geometry as
both the shortest curve joining any two of its points and as the curve
that points always in the same direction was disentangled. One line of
enquiry led to geometries that emphasised straightness as the
fundamental property (typically, projective geometry) and the other to
geometries that emphasised the shortest aspect. The former approach
was seen from the start as a non-metrical one, and became the favoured
arena for formal, even axiomatic investigations of geometry as a
deductive enterprise. The price was having less and less to say about
physical space (as Poincare observed). The concept of geometry
was radically enlarged, but in ways that were not intended to be
accounts of physical space or experiential space.



The metrical account led to a progressive elucidation of a significant
obscurity in Euclid's *Elements*: the parallel postulate.
For much of the 19th century, non-Euclidean geometries
(like Lobachevskii's) were the only alternative to Euclid's that
was proposed as an intelligible geometry, even though it was generally
agreed that only the most delicate experiments could hope to decide
the matter. Poincare's contested view was that no
experiment could so decide, and this raised important issues about the
way abstract terms are to be interpreted and the role of hypotheses in
scientific theory.



Beyond the eye-catching and thought-provoking idea of a physical
geometry alternative to Euclid's system, which had stood for two
thousand years, there was the panoply of metrical geometries hinted at
in work on differential geometry by Gauss and above all by Riemann.
Here it finally proved possible to explain the relationship between
straightest and shortest in a suitably general setting. It also became
possible to discuss geometry as a body of ideas that grew out of naive
ideas of length, angle, shape, and size, and to do so in a
sophisticated and rigorous way. What had been regarded as inescapable
axiomatic truths, necessary truths, now became hypothetical
assumptions that could be modified in many ways; the old notion of an
axiom yielded gradually to the modern one. It was also possible to
contemplate all kinds of theoretical structures as
'spaces', whether or not they were presented axiomatically
or intended as distillations of intelligible experience. In this way,
it became possible to apply geometrical ideas in novel settings and in
novel ways. Geometrisation has been ubiquitous in maths and science
ever since.



After 1900, it was clear that Euclidean geometry had lost its
pre-eminent position. This ancient system lost its certainty, and
there were better formal, axiomatic systems, such as those proposed by
Hilbert and some mathematicians in the school around Peano. There
were rich systems that were more fundamental, in the sense of using
fewer properties of the figures of traditional geometry such as the
straight line (the many versions of projective geometry). And there
was a profusion of metrical geometries with more natural starting
points and deeper theories.



As a result, ideas about how theoretical geometry of whatever kind
relates to the space around us had become much more sophisticated.
From the standpoint of pure mathematics, the situation was one of
pluralism. The truth of geometry was no longer to be taken for
granted, notoriously the Kantian viewpoint was generally abandoned.
Choosing a physical geometry had become, in some measure, an empirical
question --if we assume Poincare was not right. Philosophical
ideas about the intelligibility of geometry had also deepened. Perhaps
also from the standpoint of general science one ought to consider a
pluralistic outlook.