From quaternions to cosmology: spaces of constant curvature, ca. 1873-1925

Abstract

After mathematicians and physicists had learned that the structure of physical space was not necessarily Euclidean, it became conceivable that the global topological structure of space was non-trivial. In the context of the late 19th century debates on physical space this speculation gave rise to the problem of classifying spaces of constant curvature from a topological point of view. William Kingdon Clifford, Felix Klein and Wilhelm Killing, the latter of whom devoted a substantial amount of work to the topic in the early 1890s, clearly perceived this problem as relevant for both mathematics and natural philosophy (i.e., physics or cosmology). To some extent, a cosmological interest may even be found among those authors who restated the space form problem in more modern terms in the early 20th century, such as Heinz Hopf.