Euclid
Euclid (; – "Eukleídēs", ; fl. 300 BC), sometimes given the name Euclid of Alexandria to distinguish him from Euclides of Megara, was a Greek mathematician, often referred to as the "founder of geometry" or the "father of geometry". He was active in Alexandria during the reign of Ptolemy I (323–283 BC). His "Elements" is one of the most influential works in the history of mathematics, serving as the main textbook for teaching mathematics (especially geometry) from the time of its publication until the late 19th or early 20th century. In the "Elements", Euclid deduced the theorems of what is now called Euclidean geometry from a small set of axioms. Euclid also wrote works on perspective, conic sections, spherical geometry, number theory, and rigor.
Foundations of geometry
Apparently the first to do so was G. S. Klügel (1739–1812), a doctoral student at the University of Gottingen, with the support of his teacher A. G. Kästner, in the former's 1763 dissertation "Conatuum praecipuorum theoriam parallelarum demonstrandi recensio" (Review of the Most Celebrated Attempts at Demonstrating the Theory of Parallels). In this work Klügel examined 28 attempts to prove Postulate 5 (including Saccheri's), found them all deficient, and offered the opinion that Postulate 5 is unprovable and is supported solely by the judgment of our senses.
The beginning of the 19th century would finally witness decisive steps in the creation of non-Euclidean geometry. Circa 1813, Carl Friedrich Gauss and independently around 1818, the German professor of law Ferdinand Karl Schweikart had the germinal ideas of non-Euclidean geometry worked out, but neither published any results. Then, around 1830, the Hungarian mathematician János Bolyai and the Russian mathematician Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky separately published treatises on what we today call hyperbolic geometry. Consequently, hyperbolic geometry has been called Bolyai-Lobachevskian geometry, as both mathematicians, independent of each other, are the basic authors of non-Euclidean geometry. Gauss mentioned to Bolyai's father, when shown the younger Bolyai's work, that he had developed such a geometry several years before, though he did not publish. While Lobachevsky created a non-Euclidean geometry by negating the parallel postulate, Bolyai worked out a geometry where both the Euclidean and the hyperbolic geometry are possible depending on a parameter "k". Bolyai ends his work by mentioning that it is not possible to decide through mathematical reasoning alone if the geometry of the physical universe is Euclidean or non-Euclidean; this is a task for the physical sciences. 
The independence of the parallel postulate from Euclid's other axioms was finally demonstrated by Eugenio Beltrami in 1868.