Worlds Out of Nothing (English, Jeremy Gray)

The history of geometry

This is exactly what it promises : a history of geometry. There was a lot of stuff I didn't know about to make this book worthwhile. There is a somewhat weirder chapter in which the author warns about interpretations that become facts. Because not everybody has the time to read through all the sources, the opinion of the one that "summarizes" it tends to be interpreted as facts after him/her. That chapter alone is already enough to justify the purchase.

...

Does exactly what it says on the tin

Interesting but somewhat irritating as well (3.5 stars)

As a "general reader," rather than a student using this book in a university course, I found the material highly interesting but the treatment often frustrating.On the plus side, I did come away from it with a better understanding of the substance and goals of projective geometry, of the intellectual context of non-Euclidean geometry, and of what might be called the struggle for co-existence (pace Darwin) of multiple geometries at the end of the 19th Century.Several aspects of the book were ver