This entertaining, stimulating textbook offers anyone familiar with Euclidean Geometry -- undergraduate math students, advanced high school students, and puzzle fans of any age -- an opportunity to explore Taxicab geometry, a simple, Non-Euclidean system that helps put Euclidean Geometry in sharper perspective.
The underlying emphasis throughout this unique, challenging textbook is on how mathematicians think, and how they apply an apparently theoretical system to the solution of real-world problems..
As Professor Krause points out, "While Euclidean Geometry appears to be a good model of the \'natural\' world, Taxicab Geometry is a better model of the artificial urban world that man has built." As a result, the book is replete with practical applications of this Non-Euclidean system to urban Geometry and urban planning -- from deciding the optimum location for a factory or a phone booth, to determining the most efficient routes for a mass transit system.
However, Taxicab Geometry has important practical applications.
Because of this Non-Euclidean method of measuring distance, some familiar geometric figures are transmitted: for example, circles become squares.
Distance is not measured as the crow flies, but as a Taxicab travels the "grid" of the city street, from block to block, vertically and horizontally, until the destination is reached.
In Taxicab geometry, the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line.
This entertaining, stimulating textbook offers anyone familiar with Euclidean Geometry -- undergraduate math students, advanced high school students, and puzzle fans of any age -- an opportunity to explore Taxicab geometry, a simple, Non-Euclidean system that helps put Euclidean Geometry in sharper perspective
