modern geometry

Modern geometry is the title of a popular textbook by Dubrovin, Novikov, and Fomenko first published in 1979 (in Russian). At close to 1000 pages, the book has one major thread: geometric structures of various types on manifolds and their applications in contemporary theoretical physics. A quarter century after its publication, differential geometry, algebraic geometry, symplectic geometry, and Lie theory presented in the book remain among the most visible areas of modern geometry, with multiple connections with other parts of mathematics and physics.

Some of the representative leading figures in modern geometry are Michael Atiyah, Mikhail Gromov, and William Thurston. The common feature in their work is the use of smooth manifolds as the basic idea of space; they otherwise have rather different directions and interests. Geometry now is, in large part, the study of structures on manifolds that have a geometric meaning, in the sense of the principle of covariance that lies at the root of general relativity theory in theoretical physics. (See Category:Structures on manifolds for a survey.)
Much of this theory relates to the theory of continuous symmetry, or in other words Lie groups. From the foundational point of view, on manifolds and their geometrical structures, important is the concept of pseudogroup, defined formally by Shiing-shen Chern in pursuing ideas introduced by Élie Cartan. A pseudogroup can play the role of a Lie group of infinite dimension.

Where the traditional geometry allowed dimensions 1 (a line), 2 (a plane) and 3 (our ambient world conceived of as three-dimensional space), mathematicians have used higher dimensions for nearly two centuries. Dimension has gone through stages of being any natural number n, possibly infinite with the introduction of Hilbert space, and any positive real number in fractal geometry. Dimension theory is a technical area, initially within general topology, that discusses definitions; in common with most mathematical ideas, dimension is now defined rather than an intuition. Connected topological manifolds have a well-defined dimension; this is a theorem (invariance of domain) rather than anything a priori.
The issue of dimension still matters to geometry, in the absence of complete answers to classic questions. Dimensions 3 of space and 4 of space-time are special cases in geometric topology. Dimension 10 or 11 is a key number in string theory. Exactly why is something to which research may bring a satisfactory geometric answer.

Main article: Euclidean geometry
The study of traditional Euclidean geometry is by no means dead. It is now typically presented as the geometry of Euclidean spaces of any dimension, and of the Euclidean group of rigid motions. The fundamental formulae of geometry, such as the Pythagorean theorem, can be presented in this way for a general inner product space.
Euclidean geometry has become closely connected with computational geometry, computer graphics, convex geometry, discrete geometry, and some areas of combinatorics. Momentum was given to further work on Euclidean geometry and the Euclidean groups by crystallography and the work of H. S. M. Coxeter, and can be seen in theories of Coxeter groups and polytopes. Geometric group theory is an expanding area of the theory of more general discrete groups, drawing on geometric models and algebraic techniques.