Parallelism in diagram geometry (Q1330773)

The article introduces the concept of parallelism to diagram geometry. Although the concept of parallelism plays an essential role in affine geometry, it has played, up to now, only a minor role in incidence geometry. The central purpose of the paper is to show that parallelism has a rightful place in incidence geometry. Parallelism is closely connected to a certain kind of gluing. Suppose \(\Gamma\) and \(\Gamma'\) are geometries with parallelism such that their geometries at infinity are isomorphic. Then \(\Gamma\) and \(\Gamma'\) can be glued along their geometries at infinity. This yields a geometry of higher rank with \(\Gamma\) and \(\Gamma'\) as proper residues. This way one shows the existence of geometries over certain diagrams. Parallelism is also the starting point for the concept of parallel expansions. Roughly speaking one takes a geometry \(\Gamma\) with a parallelism and a set \(S\) of points of the geometry at infinity together with some ``subspaces''. Then all points of the geometry \(\Gamma\) with all ``subspaces'' whose ``subspace'' at infinity belongs to \(S\) form the parallel expansion of \(S\). Each of the concepts ``parallelism'', ``gluing'' and ``parallel expansion'' is introduced and developed in a separate chapter. For each of these concepts there is also a chapter with examples. These examples show how broad the concepts are and how naturally they can be applied to different settings. Although, at first sight, the treatment of parallelism in incidence geometry seems to be exhaustive, the interested reader finds a number of open problems. Hopefully, the reader becomes a writer and numerous new papers will bring parallelism back to the scene.