As someone who failed his algebra 1 final twice and geometry once, can someone explain to me what is meant be “proving” Euclid’s postulate five? Like, the point of the postulate is two lines that cross another line will, at some point, meet if they’re angled toward each other. I get that.
What I don’t understand is why that needs to be ‘solved’ or ‘proven’. What were so many mathematicians trying to do? How would they go about ‘completing’ it? Why did it need to be completed?
In: Mathematics
There’s nothing to “solve” necessarily. Euclidean geometry is made up of 5 postulates. Postulates are essentially assumed to be true. So the “problem” is that Euclid has 4 very simple beautiful postulates but the 5th one is a bit wordy and doesn’t “fit in” with the other 4 so mathematicians have tried to deduce the 5th postulate from the first four because if they could do that, then the 5th postulate would be obsolete and could be removed. It’s been attempted many times but never successfully deduced from the first 4.
There are much more meaningful and important problems to solve in mathematics than this but it is what it is.
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