![]() ![]() Lobachevsky himself did not understand the import of his work when he came out with it, but others quickly pointed out that the results (along with those of Bolyai) showed that the main example upon which Immanuel Kant had based his main thesis in his masterwork "Critique of Pure Reason" (thesis: that there were a priori synthetic truths example: the sum of the angles of a triangle adding up to a half-circle) was false, hence the thesis was false. For more detailed information, I turn to David Reid who first wrote to suggest that this work be added to my list:ĭostoevsky was an avid newspaper reader, and one of the things that made the headlines in the Russian press (for the small percentage of literate Russians at the time) was the consequences of Lobachevsky's non-Euclidean Geometry. Although the theme is not explicitly carried throughout the rest of the novel, it plays an important role by bringing into doubt the idea of objective morality which the `truth' of Euclid was meant to support. In this classic final masterwork by Dostoevsky, the existence of non-Euclidean geometry is mentioned at one point. (click on names to see more mathematical fiction ![]() ![]() ![]() A list compiled by Alex Kasman ( College of Charleston) ![]()
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