Flat circle planes as integrals of flat affine planes (Q1373237)

The author considers a construction of flat (or 2-dimensional) circle planes, that is, flat Möbius, Laguerre and Minkowski planes, from an affine plane by a process in which certain line describing functions are integrated. In fact, many of the known families of flat Möbius, Laguerre and Minkowski planes can be obtained in this way. The case of flat Laguerre planes was studied by the author in Arch. Math. 64, 75-85 (1995; Zbl 0813.51007) and serves as a model for the constructions in case of flat Möbius and Minkowski planes. The non-vertical lines in a flat affine plane are graphs of continuous functions of the real line. The collection of all integrals of these functions can be used as circle describing functions of an incidence structure that looks like a flat Laguerre plane minus one generator. If the lines of the affine plane behave well at infinity then the incidence structure can be extended by a generator to yield a flat Laguerre plane. (The non-vertical lines of the Euclidean plane are the graphs of polynomials of degree at most one; the integrals then comprise all polynomials of degree at most 2 and their graphs extended by an extra point at infinity are precisely the circles of the classical flat Laguerre plane.) For Möbius and Minkowski planes the process of integration as described for Laguerre planes has to be modified. Firstly, the circle space of a flat Minkowski plane has two connected components and these two components can be chosen rather independently. The author defines a flat pre-circle plane to be a flat Möbius or Laguerre plane or one half of a flat Minkowski plane. Secondly, in the usual representation of flat Möbius and Minkowski planes circles are not graphs of functions of the real line. For flat Möbius planes this is remedied by considering only halves of circles. Then these halves are obtained as integrals of non-vertical lines in some horizontal strip and applying a transformation that expands the horizontal strip onto the entire Euclidean plane. In the Minkowski case the whole model is transformed by a rotation by 45 degrees so that parallel classes become lines of slope \(\pm 1\) and each branch of a circle in the pre-circle plane can be described by a function. Again some transformation is applied which, in fact, the inverse of the transformation used to obtain flat Möbius planes is used. Since the family of graphs of integrals of a function is invariant under translations in the vertical direction, all circle planes obtained as integrals exhibit certain automorphisms. In fact, circle planes that can be obtained as integrals from deformed Euclidean planes are characterized by transitivity properties of their automorphism groups. In the final section of the paper the author shows how some of the Möbius planes of \textit{G. Ewald} [Abh. Math. Semin. Univ. Hamburg 30, 179-187 (1967; Zbl 0147.19802)] and the Laguerre and Minkowski plane of \textit{R. Artzy} and \textit{H. Groh} [J. Geom. 26, 1-20 (1986; Zbl 0598.51004)] can be interpreted as integrals of a suitably deformed Euclidean plane.