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Even the numerically challenged will be entranced by this clear and clever chronicle revealing the role of geometry in scientific revolutions and in the advancement of civilization itself. It began with Pythagoras, whose system of abstract rules that could model the universe became the foundation of scientific inquiry. An obscure bishop in fourteenth-century France triggered the next revolution when he produced the first graph and brought geometry and numbers together for the first time. The next revolutionary was the genius Gauss, who, at the young age of fifteen, recognized that, like the earth's surface, space could be curved. In the twentieth century, Albert Einstein once again reinvented geometry. By adding a fourth dimension -- time -- Einstein set the stage for today's cutting-edge research into yet-to-be-discovered dimensions in which space and time, matter and energy are all intertwined.
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