Jack Lee

The Curvature of Space

Do you think that everything there is to know about geometry was already discovered ages ago? Think again. Since the time of Euclid, the history of geometry has been a dramatic saga that your teachers might not tell you about. It led, more than a century ago, to the mind-bending mathematical discovery that the three-dimensional space we live in might be "curved," in much the same way as the two-dimensional surface of the earth is curved. In this talk you'll learn some of the many mathematical meanings of "curvature," what it means for space to be curved, how we can detect it, how the "local" property of curvature is related to the "global" shape of the universe, and the fascinating story of how we got from Euclid to here. Along the way, you'll find out about many "proofs" by professional mathematicians that turned out to be wrong, a million-dollar prize for solving a mathematical problem, and a mysterious modern-day Russian mathematician who earned it but didn't want it.