On Segre's product of partial line spaces and spaces of pencils (Q5954172)

A subspace \(Z\) of a partial line space \(\mathcal M\) is called strong (or singular) if any two points of \(Z\) are connected by a line. \(\mathcal M\) is called strongly connected if any two points of \(\mathcal M\) can be connected by a chain of strong subspaces such that any two consecutive ones intersect in more than one point. The authors show that any collineation of the Segre product of finitely many strongly connected partial line spaces is, up to a permutation, the product of collineations of the factors. This result applies in particular to spaces of pencils since they turn out to be strongly connected. In the second part of the paper the authors investigate the extendability of collineations of Segre products of spaces of pencils under certain natural embeddings into projective spaces.