Roads to Geometry

Book excerpt: Now available from Waveland Press, the Third Edition of Roads to Geometry is appropriate for several kinds of students. Pre-service teachers of geometry are provided with a thorough yet accessible treatment of plane geometry in a historical context. Mathematics majors will find its axiomatic development sufficiently rigorous to provide a foundation for further study in the areas of Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry. By using the SMSG postulate set as a basis for the development of plane geometry, the authors avoid the pitfalls of many “foundations of geometry” texts that encumber the reader with such a detailed development of preliminary results that many other substantive and elegant results are inaccessible in a one-semester course. At the end of each section is an ample collection of exercises of varying difficulty that provides problems that both extend and clarify results of that section, as well as problems that apply those results. At the end of chapters 3–7, a summary list of the new definitions and theorems of each chapter is included.