Cayley-Klein geometries and projective-metric geometry (Q2147370)

There is something profoundly unsatisfactory with the traditional algebraic definition of plane Cayley-Klein geometries, and this important paper ingeniously remedies those shortcomings for the first time. Following Felix Klein, the standard introduction of analytically described Cayley-Klein geometries proceeeds over the field of real numbers by the definition of an ``absolute conic'', which in turn allows the definition of different types of measures of distances and angles. While that approach unifies the three classical geometries (Euclidean, hyperbolic and elliptic), it offers little for the other Cayley-Klein geometries, given the highly degenerate nature of the absolute conic. In addition, that approach is non-elementary in the sense of first-order logic, given that logarithmic functions and the passage to limits are unavoidable. That approach makes Cayley-Klein geometries appear to be an accident of the real numbers, geometries that are dependent on the special properties of the reals. We know that this is not the case for the classical ones, given that all three have purely first-order axiomatizations, and expect something similar to be the case for all plane Cayley-Klein geometries. This paper shows how to elementarize and make possible Cayley-Klein geometries over abritrary ordered fields. The authors show how to provide ``a uniform analytic representation of the plane Cayley-Klein geometries (without any extensions of the coordinate field \(K\) or considerations of the degeneracy of an underlying absolute figure) which is elementary and allows a generalization to Cayley-Klein geometries over any ordered field \(K\),'' and they ``develop the basics of the associated theory.''