query: Who is considered the founder of geometry?
passage: History of geometry
Classic geometry was focused in compass and straightedge constructions. Geometry was revolutionized by Euclid, who introduced mathematical rigor and the axiomatic method still in use today. His book, The Elements is widely considered the most influential textbook of all time, and was known to all educated people in the West until the middle of the 20th century.[1]
passage: Foundations of geometry
In view of the role which mathematics plays in science and implications of scientific knowledge for all of our beliefs, revolutionary changes in man's understanding of the nature of mathematics could not but mean revolutionary changes in his understanding of science, doctrines of philosophy, religious and ethical beliefs, and, in fact, all intellectual disciplines.
In the first half of the nineteenth century a revolution took place in the field of geometry that was as scientifically important as the Copernican revolution in astronomy and as philosophically profound as the Darwinian theory of evolution in its impact on the way we think. This was the consequence of the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry. For over two thousand years, starting in the time of Euclid, the postulates which grounded geometry were considered self-evident truths about physical space. Geometers thought that they were deducing other, more obscure truths from them, without the possibility of error. This view became untenable with the development of hyperbolic geometry. There were now two incompatible systems of geometry (and more came later) that were self-consistent and compatible with the observable physical world. "From this point on, the whole discussion of the relation between geometry and physical space was carried on in quite different terms."