The complement of a point subset in a projective space and a Grassmann space (Q898770)

The authors study the problem of recovering the complete incidence structure (points, lines and their incidences) of a projective space or a Grassmann space from partial information. More precisely, a certain subset of points (the ``horizon'') and all lines contained in the horizon are removed from the original linear space. Call points of the horizon ``improper''. The authors' basic reconstruction technique consists of capturing a suitable notion of ``parallelism'' that can be formulated intrinsically in the remaining partial linear space and eventually (after reconstruction) just means that parallel lines intersect in the same improper point. A crucial condition for this construction to work in projective spaces is that lines have suitably many proper points. Reconstruction in Grassmann spaces is based on a reconstruction result for lines in partial projective spaces. It requires the same assumption on the number of improper points on lines as in the projective case plus an additional -- rather strong -- assumption on the existence of two maximal strong subspaces through any non-incident pair of point and line that spans a strong subspace. In their concluding section, the authors demonstrate examples of spaces where their reconstruction results apply. Excluding extreme cases with only few points on each line, include multi-hole slit spaces, polar spaces, complements of Grassmann subspaces in Grassman spaces and the complement of a polar Grassmann space count among them. But there also exist examples where their theory fails while reconstruction results are known to hold true.