All 10 Uses of
postulate
in
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
- Lateral truths point to the falseness of axioms and postulates underlying one's existing system of getting at truth.†
Part 2 *
- It had long been sought in vain, he said, to demonstrate the axiom known as Euclid's fifth postulate and this search was the start of the crisis.†
Part 3
- Euclid's postulate of parallels, which states that through a given point there's not more than one parallel line to a given straight line, we usually learn in tenth-grade geometry.†
Part 3
- Finally, in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, and almost at the same time, a Hungarian and a Russian...Bolyai and Lobachevski...established irrefutably that a proof of Euclid's fifth postulate is impossible.†
Part 3
- They did this by reasoning that if there were any way to reduce Euclid's postulate to other, surer axioms, another effect would also be noticeable: a reversal of Euclid's postulate would create logical contradictions in the geometry.†
Part 3
- They did this by reasoning that if there were any way to reduce Euclid's postulate to other, surer axioms, another effect would also be noticeable: a reversal of Euclid's postulate would create logical contradictions in the geometry.†
Part 3
- So they reversed Euclid's postulate.†
Part 3
- Thus by his failure to find any contradictions he proves that the fifth postulate is irreducible to simpler axioms.†
Part 3
- A German named Riemann appeared with another unshakable system of geometry which throws overboard not only Euclid's postulate, but also the first axiom, which states that only one straight line can pass through two points.†
Part 3
- Thus it is that the postulates can remain rigorously true even though the experimental laws that have determined their adoption are only approximative.†
Part 3
Definition:
something assumed as a basis for further logical development; or the proposal of such an assumption