Bernhard Riemann: The Habilitation Dissertation

For the show this week, we rebroadcast a presentation on Bernhard Riemann’s habilitation dissertation, “on the hypotheses which underlie geometry.” Here, Riemann strips away two thousand years of Euclid to show that geometry must be based on physics, rather than a priori assumptions, and that science itself must be based on discovery, rather than deduction. Riemann’s work was crucial in Lyndon LaRouche’s intellectual development, and takes on a renewed importance today in understanding the calamitous attacks on science starting in 1900.