Beautiful Poetry
Beautiful Poetry
Posted Feb 15, 2026 2:17 UTC (Sun) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)In reply to: Beautiful Poetry by Wol
Parent article: Poisoning scraperbots with iocaine
> Euclid laid down his axioms, including the statement "parallel lines never meet", which gave us the 3D geometry we're all familiar with. But at some point - about the time of Newton or even earlier - some people tried to formalise the axioms of geometry, and that one just "didn't fit".
Even Euclid (and contemporaries) didn't like it. That's why the parallel postulate isn't used for the entire first book until the end (constructing a square IIRC).