No label defined (Q3148446)

It is well known that six distances between four points on the Euclidean plane must satisfy some equation: they must annihilate the Cayley--Menger determinant. The so-called ``theory of physical structures'' studies arbitrary mappings satisfying some (a priori unknown) functional equation and calls such objects ``geometries''. The ``Helmholtz plane'' corresponds to the function \(f\:\mathbb R^2\times\mathbb R^2\to\mathbb R\) given by the formula \[ f\bigl((x_1,y_1),(x_2,y_2)\bigr)= [(x_1-x_2)^2+(y_1-y_2)^2]\exp 2\alpha\arctan\frac{y_1-y_2}{x_1-x_2} \] with arbitrary \(\alpha >0\) (see, for example, [\textit{G. G. Mikhailichenko}, Sov. Math., Dokl. 24, 346-348 (1981; Zbl 0489.51010)]). In the paper under review, the author studies two-dimensional manifolds whose tangent planes can be treated as the above ``Helmholtz planes''. From the technical point of view, the author repeats basic constructions of the Riemannian geometry replacing the Riemannian metric by the above mapping \(f\) (or another mapping known from the paper by Mikhailichenko) in all formulas. Unfortunately, he gives no comments about the geometrical sense of, say, the covariant derivative introduced in such a manner.