- Major branches of geometry
- History of geometry
- Ancient geometry: practical and empirical
- Ancient geometry: abstract and applied
- Ancient geometry: cosmological and metaphysical
Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.Join Britannica's Publishing Partner Program and our community of experts to gain a global audience for your work!
Geometry, the branch of mathematics concerned with the shape of individual objects, spatial relationships among various objects, and the properties of surrounding space. It is one of the oldest branches of mathematics, having arisen in response to such practical problems as those found in surveying, and its name is derived from Greek words meaning “Earth measurement.” Eventually it was realized that geometry need not be limited to the study of flat surfaces (plane geometry) and rigid three-dimensional objects (solid geometry) but that even the most abstract thoughts and images might be represented and developed in geometric terms.
This article begins with a brief guidepost to the major branches of geometry and then proceeds to an extensive historical treatment. For information on specific branches of geometry, see Euclidean geometry, analytic geometry, projective geometry, differential geometry, non-Euclidean geometries, and topology.
Major branches of geometry
In several ancient cultures there developed a form of geometry suited to the relationships between lengths, areas, and volumes of physical objects. This geometry was codified in Euclid’s Elements about 300 bce on the basis of 10 axioms, or postulates, from which several hundred theorems were proved by deductive logic. The Elements epitomized the axiomatic-deductive method for many centuries.
Analytic geometry was initiated by the French mathematician René Descartes (1596–1650), who introduced rectangular coordinates to locate points and to enable lines and curves to be represented with algebraic equations. Algebraic geometry is a modern extension of the subject to multidimensional and non-Euclidean spaces.
Projective geometry originated with the French mathematician Girard Desargues (1591–1661) to deal with those properties of geometric figures that are not altered by projecting their image, or “shadow,” onto another surface.
The German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855), in connection with practical problems of surveying and geodesy, initiated the field of differential geometry. Using differential calculus, he characterized the intrinsic properties of curves and surfaces. For instance, he showed that the intrinsic curvature of a cylinder is the same as that of a plane, as can be seen by cutting a cylinder along its axis and flattening, but not the same as that of a sphere, which cannot be flattened without distortion.
Beginning in the 19th century, various mathematicians substituted alternatives to Euclid’s parallel postulate, which, in its modern form, reads, “given a line and a point not on the line, it is possible to draw exactly one line through the given point parallel to the line.” They hoped to show that the alternatives were logically impossible. Instead, they discovered that consistent non-Euclidean geometries exist.
Topology, the youngest and most sophisticated branch of geometry, focuses on the properties of geometric objects that remain unchanged upon continuous deformation—shrinking, stretching, and folding, but not tearing. The continuous development of topology dates from 1911, when the Dutch mathematician L.E.J. Brouwer (1881–1966) introduced methods generally applicable to the topic.
History of geometry
The earliest known unambiguous examples of written records—dating from Egypt and Mesopotamia about 3100 bce—demonstrate that ancient peoples had already begun to devise mathematical rules and techniques useful for surveying land areas, constructing buildings, and measuring storage containers. Beginning about the 6th century bce, the Greeks gathered and extended this practical knowledge and from it generalized the abstract subject now known as geometry, from the combination of the Greek words geo (“Earth”) and metron (“measure”) for the measurement of the Earth.
In addition to describing some of the achievements of the ancient Greeks, notably Euclid’s logical development of geometry in the Elements, this article examines some applications of geometry to astronomy, cartography, and painting from classical Greece through medieval Islam and Renaissance Europe. It concludes with a brief discussion of extensions to non-Euclidean and multidimensional geometries in the modern age.
Ancient geometry: practical and empirical
The origin of geometry lies in the concerns of everyday life. The traditional account, preserved in Herodotus’s History (5th century bce), credits the Egyptians with inventing surveying in order to reestablish property values after the annual flood of the Nile. Similarly, eagerness to know the volumes of solid figures derived from the need to evaluate tribute, store oil and grain, and build dams and pyramids. Even the three abstruse geometrical problems of ancient times—to double a cube, trisect an angle, and square a circle, all of which will be discussed later—probably arose from practical matters, from religious ritual, timekeeping, and construction, respectively, in pre-Greek societies of the Mediterranean. And the main subject of later Greek geometry, the theory of conic sections, owed its general importance, and perhaps also its origin, to its application to optics and astronomy.
While many ancient individuals, known and unknown, contributed to the subject, none equaled the impact of Euclid and his Elements of geometry, a book now 2,300 years old and the object of as much painful and painstaking study as the Bible. Much less is known about Euclid, however, than about Moses. In fact, the only thing known with a fair degree of confidence is that Euclid taught at the Library of Alexandria during the reign of Ptolemy I (323–285/283 bce). Euclid wrote not only on geometry but also on astronomy and optics and perhaps also on mechanics and music. Only the Elements, which was extensively copied and translated, has survived intact.
Euclid’s Elements was so complete and clearly written that it literally obliterated the work of his predecessors. What is known about Greek geometry before him comes primarily from bits quoted by Plato and Aristotle and by later mathematicians and commentators. Among other precious items they preserved are some results and the general approach of Pythagoras (c. 580–c. 500 bce) and his followers. The Pythagoreans convinced themselves that all things are, or owe their relationships to, numbers. The doctrine gave mathematics supreme importance in the investigation and understanding of the world. Plato developed a similar view, and philosophers influenced by Pythagoras or Plato often wrote ecstatically about geometry as the key to the interpretation of the universe. Thus ancient geometry gained an association with the sublime to complement its earthy origins and its reputation as the exemplar of precise reasoning.
Finding the right angle
Ancient builders and surveyors needed to be able to construct right angles in the field on demand. The method employed by the Egyptians earned them the name “rope pullers” in Greece, apparently because they employed a rope for laying out their construction guidelines. One way that they could have employed a rope to construct right triangles was to mark a looped rope with knots so that, when held at the knots and pulled tight, the rope must form a right triangle. The simplest way to perform the trick is to take a rope that is 12 units long, make a knot 3 units from one end and another 5 units from the other end, and then knot the ends together to form a loop, as shown in the animation. However, the Egyptian scribes have not left us instructions about these procedures, much less any hint that they knew how to generalize them to obtain the Pythagorean theorem: the square on the line opposite the right angle equals the sum of the squares on the other two sides. Similarly, the Vedic scriptures of ancient India contain sections called sulvasutras, or “rules of the rope,” for the exact positioning of sacrificial altars. The required right angles were made by ropes marked to give the triads (3, 4, 5) and (5, 12, 13).
In Babylonian clay tablets (c. 1700–1500 bce) modern historians have discovered problems whose solutions indicate that the Pythagorean theorem and some special triads were known more than a thousand years before Euclid. A right triangle made at random, however, is very unlikely to have all its sides measurable by the same unit—that is, every side a whole-number multiple of some common unit of measurement. This fact, which came as a shock when discovered by the Pythagoreans, gave rise to the concept and theory of incommensurability.
Locating the inaccessible
By ancient tradition, Thales of Miletus, who lived before Pythagoras in the 6th century bce, invented a way to measure inaccessible heights, such as the Egyptian pyramids. Although none of his writings survives, Thales may well have known about a Babylonian observation that for similar triangles (triangles having the same shape but not necessarily the same size) the length of each corresponding side is increased (or decreased) by the same multiple. A determination of the height of a tower using similar triangles is demonstrated in the figure. The ancient Chinese arrived at measures of inaccessible heights and distances by another route, using “complementary” rectangles, as seen in the next , which can be shown to give results equivalent to those of the Greek method involving triangles.
Estimating the wealth
A Babylonian cuneiform tablet written some 3,500 years ago treats problems about dams, wells, water clocks, and excavations. It also has an exercise on circular enclosures with an implied value of π = 3. The contractor for King Solomon’s swimming pool, who made a pond 10 cubits across and 30 cubits around (1 Kings 7:23), used the same value. However, the Hebrews should have taken their π from the Egyptians before crossing the Red Sea, for the Rhind papyrus (c. 2000 bce; our principal source for ancient Egyptian mathematics) implies π = 3.1605.
Knowledge of the area of a circle was of practical value to the officials who kept track of the pharaoh’s tribute as well as to the builders of altars and swimming pools. Ahmes, the scribe who copied and annotated the Rhind papyrus (c. 1650 bce), has much to say about cylindrical granaries and pyramids, whole and truncated. He could calculate their volumes, and, as appears from his taking the Egyptian seked, the horizontal distance associated with a vertical rise of one cubit, as the defining quantity for the pyramid’s slope, he knew something about similar triangles.