Everything goes better with sharks…
Sharks!
Given the successes of “Shark Week” and Sharknado, it’s a sure bet that Hollywood will move to remake the classics to feature those creepily-cartilaginous predators. See what to expect at Sharks Make Movies Better.
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As we decide that it isn’t yet, perhaps, safe to go back into the water, we might might send carefully-calculated birthday greetings to Giovanni Girolamo Saccheri; he was born on this date in 1667. A Jesuit priest and Scholastic philosopher, Saccheri is probably best remembered for his attempt to disprove the fifth postulate of Euclid (“through any point not on a given line, one and only one line can be drawn that is parallel to the given line”). In fact, Saccheri’s thinking closely mirrored that of Omar Khayyám’s 11th Century Discussion of Difficulties in Euclid (Risâla fî sharh mâ ashkala min musâdarât Kitâb ‘Uglîdis)– though it’s not clear that Saccheri knew the earlier work.
In any case, Saccheri’s Euclides ab omni naevo vindicatus (Euclid Freed of Every Flaw, 1733) helped lay the foundation for what we now call Non-Euclidean Geometry.
