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14 votes
0 answers
552 views

Who conjectured that a transitive projective plane is Desarguesian?

The only known finite projective plane with a transitive automorphism group is the Desarguesian plane $PG(2,q)$ and it seems likely that there are no others, although this is not (quite) proved. ...
Gordon Royle's user avatar
  • 12.7k
11 votes
3 answers
557 views

Was the small Desargues Theorem known to ancient Greeks?

My question concerns the classical Desargues Theorem and its simplest version The small Desargues Theorem: Let $A$, $B$, $C$ be three distinct parallel lines and $a,a'\in A$, $b,b'\in B$, $c,c'\in C$,...
Taras Banakh's user avatar
10 votes
1 answer
381 views

About the paper by Buekenhout, Delandtsheer, Doyen, Kleidman, Liebeck and Saxl

The paper by Buekenhout, Delandtsheer, Doyen, Kleidman, Liebeck and Saxl called Linear spaces with flag transitive automorphism groups (Geom. Dedicata) from 1990 annonces a very powerful ...
Pierre's user avatar
  • 2,287
10 votes
0 answers
245 views

Projective planes over non-division rings

Is there a "right" notion of a projective plane over a general (unital, non-division) ring? Let me explain what type of object I am looking for. Let $R$ be an arbitrary (not necessarily ...
Anton Izosimov's user avatar
7 votes
0 answers
284 views

What are $(m,n)$-pseudoplanes?

An incidence geometry is a set $P$ (the "points"), a set $L$ (the "lines"), and a relation $I\subseteq P\times L$ ("incidence"). Equivalently, a bipartite graph with the halves of the partition ...
Alex Kruckman's user avatar
6 votes
2 answers
713 views

Reference on the Veblen-Young characterization of projective spaces

Can someone point me to a modern treatment of the Veblen-Young characterization of projective spaces of dimension greater than $2$ as $P(V)$ for some vector space $V$? [Added: see here for a ...
Mariano Suárez-Álvarez's user avatar
5 votes
1 answer
341 views

Which finite projective planes can have a symmetric incidence matrix?

As the title says. Which finite projective planes admit a symmetric incidence matrix? I am not an expert in the field at all, but I consulted with one. He claimed that $PG(2, \mathbb F_q)$ can always ...
Adelhart's user avatar
  • 237
5 votes
0 answers
89 views

Lines meeting a given set in a unique point

Let $p$ be a fixed prime, and suppose that $S$ is a subset of the affine plane $\mathbb F_p^2$. If $|S|\le p+1$, then by the pigeonhole principle, through any given point $s\in S$ there is a line $L=L(...
Seva's user avatar
  • 23k
2 votes
0 answers
169 views

theories where angles exist without a metric

The underlying basic question, which I'm sure I'm not the first to ask, is what are the possible exotic/nonintuitive models of Euclid's axioms/postulates, outside the one where "lines" are interpreted ...
Mircea's user avatar
  • 2,041