The Cinderella career of projective geometry (Q2638516)

The author addresses his paper to readers who know the basics of projective geometry (PG) and are interested in the historical aspects of its evolution. It begins with an Introduction that describes some of the conceptual basics of PG. More of this is explained in the Appendix, such as cross ratio, harmonic tetrad, perspectivity, projectivity, involution, and polarity. The Introduction begins with homogeneous coordinates over the real and the complex field. Then the author's walk through the history of PG begins, of course with the ancient Greeks, in particular Apollonius and Pappus who knew the projective invariance of harmonic tetrads and of cross ratio. The next major progress is due to Desargues, Pascal, and de la Hire in the 17th century. The author cites N. A. Glagolew on the beginning competition of synthetic and ``analytic'' (better: algebraic) methods in which the latter finally dominated. The most important names about 1800 are Poncelet and Steiner who used synthetic methods, based on foundations from Algebra and/or Euclidean geometry (EG). This was inevitable, as axiomatic geometry in the modern sense did not yet exist. It was von Staudt who made PG independent of EG by consequent use of harmonic tetrads. Then Laguerre succeeded in embedding EG into PG, for instance by defining angles as cross ratios involving the two absolute (imaginary infinite) points of the circles. The introduction of homogeneous coordinates by Möbius and Plücker in the 19th century is only briefly mentioned. Then the author sketches the inclusion of Bolyai's and Lobachewski's hyperbolic geometry into PG by Cayley and Klein, culminating in the latter's Erlanger Program which established the relations of geometry to group theory. Here the paper ends. The modern development of PG, beginning with the fundamental book of Veblen and Young, the nondesarguesian planes, and PG over arbitrary (even skew) fields is not touched in the paper.