Topological affine planes with non-continuous parallelism. (Q1179143)

The author gives a negative solution to one of the long standing problems in topological geometry by constructing a topological affine plane which has a non-continuous parallelism and hence cannot be embedded into a topological projective plane. Roughly, the construction is as follows. Let \(E\) be a topological affine plane with point set \(IR^ 2\) (or more generally \(L^{2k}\), where \(L\) is a real closed field) and let \(A\subseteqq IR^ 2\). One gets an induced subgeometry \(E_ A\) with point set \(A\) by taking as lines of \(E_ A\) all lines of \(E\) which intersect \(A\) in at least two points. Using concepts from model theory and algebraic geometry the author shows that it is possible to choose \(E\) and \(A\) in such a way that \(E_ A\) is an affine plane but the parallelism of \(E_ A\) is not the one induced from \(E\). It is then easy to see that \(E_ A\) is a topological affine plane with non-continuous parallelism.