Remarks on the first non-Desarguesian planar geometry by Hilbert (Q1281745)

The apparently oldest example \({\mathcal H}\) of a non-Desarguesian plane geometry was provided by Hilbert in his lectures on the foundations of geometry in 1898/1899. Since \({\mathcal H}\) is not an affine plane, it was discarded in favour of an affine non-Desarguesian geometry in the first edition of the \textit{Grundlagen der Geometrie}. The author of this note establishes several interesting properties of \({\mathcal H}\): it is an \({\mathbb R}^2\)-plane (its point-set is homeomorphic to \({\mathbb R}^2\) and its lines are closed subsets that are homeomorphic to \({\mathbb R}\)) which cannot be embedded as an open subgeometry in a topological projective plane, and all points that do not lie on a certain line have neighborhoods in which Desargues' theorem holds. Moreover, he determines the group of automorphisms of an isomorph of \({\mathcal H}\) and notes that that isomorph of \({\mathcal H}\) had already appeared in the classification of \({\mathbb R}^2\)-planes with 3-dimensional automorphism group fixing precisely one line, given by \textit{H. Groh, M. F. Lippert} and \textit{H.-J. Pohl} [J. Geom. 21, 66-96 (1983; Zbl 0528.51004)] as well as earlier in \textit{A. Ortmann}'s 1975 Diplomarbeit (Tübingen) and in \textit{D. Betten} and \textit{A. Ortmann} [Geom. Dedicata 7, 141-162 (1978; Zbl 0384.51010)].