A Course in Modern Geometries (Undergraduate Texts in Mathematics) - Hardcover

Cederberg, Judith N.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0387989722 ISBN 13: 9780387989723

Publisher: Springer, 2000

Synopsis

Designed for a junior-senior level course for mathematics majors, including those who plan to teach in secondary school. The first chapter presents several finite geometries in an axiomatic framework, while Chapter 2 continues the synthetic approach in introducing both Euclids and ideas of non-Euclidean geometry. There follows a new introduction to symmetry and hands-on explorations of isometries that precedes an extensive analytic treatment of similarities and affinities. Chapter 4 presents plane projective geometry both synthetically and analytically, and the new Chapter 5 uses a descriptive and exploratory approach to introduce chaos theory and fractal geometry, stressing the self-similarity of fractals and their generation by transformations from Chapter 3. Throughout, each chapter includes a list of suggested resources for applications or related topics in areas such as art and history, plus this second edition points to Web locations of author-developed guides for dynamic software explorations of the Poincaré model, isometries, projectivities, conics and fractals. Parallel versions are available for "Cabri Geometry" and "Geometers Sketchpad".

About this title

Review

Second Edition

J. N. Cederberg

A Course in Modern Geometries

"Cederberg’s book has the virtue of exceptionally clear exposition and at the same time, it is brief enough not to exhaust one’s patience . . . I have seen hundreds of college-level texts on geometry and this is one of the handful I like the most."

―THE UMAP JOURNAL

Synopsis

"A Course in Modern Geometries" is designed for a junior-senior level course for mathematics majors, including those who plan to teach in secondary school. Chapter 1 presents several finite geometries in an axiomatic framework. Chapter 2 continues the synthetic approach as it introduces Euclid's geometry and ideas of non-Euclidean geometry. In Chapter 3, a new introduction to symmetry and hands-on explorations of isometries precedes the extensive analytic treatment of isometries, similarities and affinities. A new concluding section explores isometries of space. Chapter 4 presents plane projective geometry both synthetically and analytically. The extensive use of matrix representations of groups of transformations in Chapters 3-4 reinforces ideas from linear algebra and serves as excellent preparation for a course in abstract algebra.The new Chapter 5 uses a descriptive and exploratory approach to introduce chaos theory and fractal geometry, stressing the self-similarity of fractals and their generation by transformations from Chapter 3. Each chapter includes a list of suggested resources for applications or related topics in areas such as art and history.

The second edition also includes pointers to the web location of author-developed guides for dynamic software explorations of the Poincare model, isometries, projectivities, conics and fractals. Parallel versions of these explorations are available for "Cabri Geometry" and "Geometer's Sketchpad". Judith N. Cederberg is an associate professor of mathematics at St. Olaf College in Minnesota.

Edition details

• Publisher: Springer
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0387989722
• ISBN 13: 9780387989723
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 460