Ovoidal Laguerre planes are weakly Miquelian (Q1289290): Difference between revisions

Miquel's configuration in a Laguerre plane involves eight mutually nonparallel points and six circles. It characterises the Miquelian Laguerre planes, that is, those planes that can be obtained as the geometry of plane sections of an elliptic cone without its apex in 3-dimensional projective space. If some of the points are parallel or even equal, various variations of Miquel's configuration are obtained. In variation \textbf{M2} the eight points occur in four pairs of parallel points as follows. \textbf{M2} Whenever \(A\), \(B\), \(C\), \(D\), \(E\), \(F\), \(G\) and \(H\) are eight different points with \(A\| F\), \(B\| E\), \(C\| H\) and \(D\| G\) such that each of the sets \(\{A,B,C,D\}\), \(\{B,C,F,G\}\) and \(\{D,A,H,E\}\) is contained in a circle, then there is a circle containing \(\{E,F,G,H\}\). It is known that condition \textbf{M2} is satisfied in every Miquelian Laguerre plane. \textit{O. Bröcker} [J. Geom. 61, No. 1-2, 32-38 (1998; Zbl 0905.51002)] showed that this condition is also satisfied in the non-Miquelian ovoidal Laguerre plane over the oval constructed from the parabolic curve \(f(x)=x^4\) over the reals. His method uses the description of the Laguerre plane in one of its derived affine planes and employs explicit and rather lengthy computations. In the note under review the author gives a short and elegant proof that in fact every ovoidal Laguerre plane satisfies condition \textbf{M2}. His method is elementary and completely geometric and just uses certain lines and planes in the surrounding projective space. (In fact, condition \textbf{M2} can also be seen as a degeneration of the bundle condition and it is well known that the bundle condition characterises ovoidal Laguerre planes).