Lecture Description
The beautiful formulas for the surface area and volume of a sphere go back to Archimedes, who also discovered some other remarkable facts relating spheres to circumscribing cylinders. We describe these results.Then we introduce rational turn angles---a renormalization of the notion of angle so that perpendicular lines are represented not by 90 degrees, or by pi/2 radians, but rather by 1/4 turn. This is mathematically the most natural parametrization of an angle, and we restate the sum of angles in a triangle and quadrilateral in terms of turn angles. We state a useful Proportionality Principle. A famous theorem of Harriot (or Girard) gives the ratio of the area of a spherical triangle to the area of the sphere in terms of the sum of turn angles.
Course Index
- Introduction to Universal Hyperbolic Geometry
- Apollonius and Polarity
- Apollonius and Harmonic Conjugates
- Pappus' Theorem and the Cross Ratio
- First Steps in Hyperbolic Geometry
- The Circle and Cartesian Coordinates
- Duality, Quadrance and Spread in Cartesian Coordinates
- The Circle and Projective Homogeneous Coordinates
- The Circle and Projective Homogeneous Coordinates II
- Computations with Homogeneous Coordinates
- Duality and Perpendicularity
- Existence of Orthocenters
- Theorems using Perpendicularity
- Null Points and Null Lines
- Apollonius and Polarity Revisited
- Reflections in Hyperbolic Geometry
- Reflections and Projective Linear Algebra
- Midpoints and Bisectors
- Medians, Midlines, Centroids and Circumcenters
- Parallels and the Double Triangle
- The J function, sl(2) and the Jacobi identity
- Pure and Applied Geometry: understanding the continuum
- Quadrance and Spread
- Pythagoras' Theorem in Universal Hyperbolic Geometry
- The Triple Quad Formula in Universal Hyperbolic Geometry
- Visualizing Quadrance with Circles
- Geometer's Sketchpad and Circles in Universal Hyperbolic Geometry
- Trigonometric Laws in Hyperbolic Geometry using Geometer's Sketchpad
- The Spread Law in Universal Hyperbolic Geometry
- The Cross Law in Universal Hyperbolic Geometry
- Thales' Theorem, Right Triangles and Napier's Rules
- Isosceles Triangles in Hyperbolic Geometry
- Menelaus, Ceva and the Laws of Proportion
- Trigonometric Dual Laws and the Parallax Formula
- Introduction to Spherical and Elliptic Geometries
- Introduction to Spherical and Elliptic Geometries II
- Areas and Volumes for a Sphere
- Classical Spherical Trigonometry
- Perpendicularity, Polarity and Duality on a Sphere
- Parametrizing and Projecting a Sphere
- Rational Trigonometry: An Overview
- Rational Trigonometry in Three Dimensions
Course Description
This is a complete and relatively elementary course explaining a new, simpler and more elegant theory of non-Euclidean geometry; in particular hyperbolic geometry. It is a purely algebraic approach which avoids transcendental functions like log, sin, tanh etc, relying instead on high school algebra and quadratic equations. The theory is more general, extending beyond the null circle, and connects naturally to Einstein's special theory of relativity. This course is meant for mathematics majors, bright high school students, high school teachers, engineers, scientists, and others with an interest in mathematics and some basic algebraic skills. NJ Wildberger is also the developer of Rational Trigonometry: a new and better way of learning and using trigonometry. Look up for his course in order to familiarize with this new development. He also has recorded very organized and detailed lecture series on Algebraic Topology, History of Mathematic, Linear Algebra, and more.