When two parallel lines intersect…

[Note: Continuing this week of respite from the elections, I wrote this light-hearted but serious piece on writing techniques. Enjoy.]

I shook the mathematical beliefs of my thirteen-year-old niece the other afternoon. An elementary problem in algebra required knowing that the measures of the interior angles in a triangle sum to 180 degrees. That’s in Euclidean geometry. I commented that there are other non-Euclidean geometries where that “rule” is not true. In one of these geometries, paralle...