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Non-Euclidean geometry

In the lifetime of Gauss, a vivid discussion on the Parallel postulate in Euclidean geometry was going on. Numerous efforts were made to prove it in the frame of the Euclidean axioms, whereas some mathematicians discussed the possibility of geometrical systems without it. Gauss thought about the basics of geometry since the 1790s years, but in the 1810s he realized that a non-Euclidean geometry without the parallel postulate could solve the problem. In a letter to Franz Taurinus of 1824, he presented a short comprehensible outline of what he named a " non-Euclidean geometry ", but he strongly forbade Taurinus to make any use of it.

The first publications on non-Euclidean geometry in the history of mathematics were authored by Nikolai Lobachevsky in 1829 and Janos Bolyai in 1832. In the following years, Gauss wrote his ideas on the topic but did not publish them, thus avoiding influencing the contemporary scientific discussion. Gauss commended the ideas of Janos Bolyai in a letter to his father and university friend Farkas Bolyai claiming that these were congruent to his own thoughts of some decades. However, it is not quite clear to what extent he preceded Lobachevsky and Bolyai, as his letter remarks are only vague and obscure.

Sartorius mentioned Gauss's work on non-Euclidean geometry firstly in 1856, but only the edition of left papers in Volume VIII of the Collected Works (1900) showed Gauss's ideas on that matter, at a time when non-Euclidean geometry had yet grown out of controversial discussion.