The Fifth Postulate: How Unraveling a Two-Thousand-Year-Old Mystery Unraveled the Universe

Euclidean geometry has been profoundly influential for centuries, but its Fifth Postulate (which asserts that two parallel lines will never intersect) eluded all attempts to prove it for thousands of years. What happened when three nineteenth-century mathematicians realized that there was no way to prove the Fifth Postulate and that it ought to be discarded -- along with everything they'd come to "know" about geometry?

Jason Socrates Bardi shares the dramatic story of the insight that set the stage for the non-Euclidian geometries that made the theory of relativity, string theory, black holes, and other scientific advances possible.