University of Pennsylvania professor Robert Ghrist, in his September 19 lecture ("Putting Topology to Work") at the MAA's Carriage House, credited poet John Milton (1608-1674) with the first use of the word space as an abstract entity -- and, Ghrist asserted, by so doing, Milton opened a door to the study of abstract space (known in mathematics as topology).
The following material is a 24 September correction
from my 23 September posting. For I discovered -- in a thoughtful email from Ghrist --
that the proper citation of "space" was not from line 50 of Book 1 but from line 89 of Book 7.
Here, below, I have replaced my original posting of lines 44-74 of Book 1
with lines 80 - 97 of Book 7 -- lines taken from my shelf copy of Milton's Paradise Lost,
In the selection below and throughout his epic, Milton replaces past visions of hell down-in-the-earth and heaven up-in-the-sky with more complex and abstract configurations.