Geometry from a differentiable viewpoint

"The development of geometry from Euclid to Euler to Lobachevsky, Bolyai, Gauss, and Riemann is a story that is often broken into parts - axiomatic geometry, non-Euclidean geometry, and differential geometry. This poses a problem for undergraduates: Which part is geometry? What is the big picture to which these parts belong? In this introduction to differential geometry, the parts are united with all of their interrelations, motivated by the history of the parallel postulate. Beginning with the ancient sources, the author first explores synthetic methods in Euclidean and non-Euclidean…