On the relationship between plane and solid geometry

Traditional geometry concerns itself with planimetric and stereometric considerations, which are at the root of the division between plane and solid geometry. To raise the issue of the relation between these two areas brings with it a host of different problems that pertain to mathematical practice, epistemology, semantics, ontology, methodology, and logic. In addition, issues of psychology and pedagogy are also important here. To our knowledge there is no single contribution that studies in detail even one of the aforementioned area

Geometry in the Transition from Primary to Post-Primary

This article is intended as a kind of precursor to the document Geometry for Post-primary School Mathematics, part of the Mathematics Syllabus for Junior Certicate issued by the Irish National Council for Curriculum and Assessment in the context of Project Maths. Our purpose is to place that document in the context of an overview of plane geometry, touching on several important pedagogical and historical aspects, in the hope that this will prove useful for teachers.Comment: 19 page

Trigonometry of spacetimes: a new self-dual approach to a curvature/signature (in)dependent trigonometry

A new method to obtain trigonometry for the real spaces of constant curvature and metric of any (even degenerate) signature is presented. The method encapsulates trigonometry for all these spaces into a single basic trigonometric group equation. This brings to its logical end the idea of an absolute trigonometry, and provides equations which hold true for the nine two-dimensional spaces of constant curvature and any signature. This family of spaces includes both relativistic and non-relativistic homogeneous spacetimes; therefore a complete discussion of trigonometry in the six de Sitter, minkowskian, Newton--Hooke and galilean spacetimes follow as particular instances of the general approach. Any equation previously known for the three classical riemannian spaces also has a version for the remaining six spacetimes; in most cases these equations are new. Distinctive traits of the method are universality and self-duality: every equation is meaningful for the nine spaces at once, and displays explicitly invariance under a duality transformation relating the nine spaces. The derivation of the single basic trigonometric equation at group level, its translation to a set of equations (cosine, sine and dual cosine laws) and the natural apparition of angular and lateral excesses, area and coarea are explicitly discussed in detail. The exposition also aims to introduce the main ideas of this direct group theoretical way to trigonometry, and may well provide a path to systematically study trigonometry for any homogeneous symmetric space.Comment: 51 pages, LaTe

Hyperbolic geometry in the work of Johann Heinrich Lambert

The memoir Theorie der Parallellinien (1766) by Johann Heinrich Lambert is one of the founding texts of hyperbolic geometry, even though its author's aim was, like many of his pre-decessors', to prove that such a geometry does not exist. In fact, Lambert developed his theory with the hope of finding a contradiction in a geometry where all the Euclidean axioms are kept except the parallel axiom and that the latter is replaced by its negation. In doing so, he obtained several fundamental results of hyperbolic geometry. This was sixty years before the first writings of Lobachevsky and Bolyai appeared in print. In the present paper, we present Lambert's main results and we comment on them. A French translation of the Theorie der Parallellinien, together with an extensive commentary, has just appeared in print (A. Papadopoulos and G. Th{\'e}ret, La th{\'e}orie des lignes parall{\`e}les de Johann Heinrich Lambert. Collection Sciences dans l'Histoire, Librairie Scientifique et Technique Albert Blanchard, Paris, 2014)