"When people learn I'm a mathematician, they often ask me a variety of questions,” she said, one of the most common ones being something like “Isn’t all of math already known? Isn't it all written down in a book?”
During her hour-long talk, Taback used the history of geometry to show that mathematics is a dynamic discipline, changing like any other scholarly field when bold people question its assumptions and their implications. Most of us can relate to geometry as a branch of mathematics, she commented. “It's a topic that many assume was codified by Euclid … and hasn't changed since. However, the story I will tell you today will illuminate the twists and turns, sometimes radical, which geometry has taken over many centuries.”
Watch Taback's Lecture: A Brief - and Subjective - History of Geometry:
