An expedition to geometry (Q5920509)

The authors have devised a textbook to attract the attention of undergraduates to geometry, in the belief that ``there is no introductory book which gives modern aspects of geometry at undergraduate/graduate level'' Although this belief is mistaken, given the existence of \textit{E. M. Schröder's} [Vorlesungen über Geometrie I, II, III (BI-Wiss.-Verlag, Mannheim) (1992; Zbl 0754.51002, 1991; Zbl 0754.51003, 1992; Zbl 0754.51004)], the book under review is enjoyable to read. It introduces plane affine geometry, with emphasis on affine planes over commutative fields, moves on via the projective completion to projective planes over fields and has a section devoted to the projective line, classifies conics in both the affine and projective settings, introduces Euclidean geometry as inner-poduct spaces, and studies in much more detail than one would expect in such a short introduction, the 2-dimensional hyperbolic and spherical geometries, all over \(\mathbb{R}\). Differential geometry appears in its one- and two-dimensional settings in a section and a chapter respectively. Some of the strength of the book lie in the study of geometric transformations and group actions, the carried-out computations for many proofs that tend to be left out in other texts such as the computation of the areas of geodesic triangles in the hyperbolic and spherical plane, as well as the proofs of the two-point homogeneity property of the classical 2-dimensional geometries. The axiomatic approach is followed only in the affine and projective case. In the Euclidean case it is absent, and in the hyperbolic and elliptic case the only axioms mentioned are some rudimentary incidence axioms.