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
I’m no expert so take this with a grain of salt.
The issue is when your creating a theory of how the world works at some point you have to make assumptions. The more assumptions you make the more susceptible your theory is to being proven wrong. As I understand it the attempts to “prove” the fifth postulate was an attempt to describe it in terms of the previous 4 postulates thus removing the fifth and making the theory more robust.
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