Characterization of three types of planar spaces with invisible planes (Q2563494)

A planar space is a geometry with points, lines and planes such that every two points determine a unique line, and every three noncollinear points determine a unique plane. The nondegeneracy conditions are: every line contains at least two points, every plane contains at least three noncollinear points and there are at least two planes. Under suitable conditions, one can embed a finite planar space into a finite projective space, as shown by \textit{Klaus Metsch} [proceedings of Combinatorics '94, in press]. The paper under review tackles the problem of classifying planar spaces where there are only two possibilities for the number of points in a plane. According to the authors, additional axioms are needed. They basically say that the planes of highest cardinality (which the authors call visible planes) are in the majority. The other planes are called the invisible planes, though they are as visible as the first kind of planes. The authors now take these axioms together with almost all conditions under which a planar space is embeddable in a projective 3-space, and show that the planar space must then be obtained from a finite projective 3-space by deleting a line, two skew lines, or a hyperbolic quadric, respectively, granted there are at least two nonintersecting planes.