2

Projective planes

Möge diese Büchlein dazu beitragen dies schöne Gebiet

über die Jahrhunderte zu retten.
Blaschke, Projektive Geometrie 1949

The basis of all investigations in this book will be projective geome-

try. Although, projective geometry has a tradition of more than 200 years
it gives a fresh look at many problems, even today. One could even say
that the essence of this book is to view many well known geometric ef-
fects/setups/statements/environments from a projective viewpoint.
One of the usual approaches to projective geometry is the axiomatic one.
There, in the spirit of Euclid, a few axioms are set up and a projective geom-
etry is definied as any system that satisfies these axioms. We will very briefly
meet this approach in this chapter. The main part of this book will, however,
be much more concrete and “down to earth”. We will predominatly study
projective geometries that are defined over a specific coordinate field (most
prominently the real numbers R or the complex numbers C). This gives us
the chance to directly investigate the interplay of geometric objects (points,
lines, circles, conics,. . . ) and the algebraic structures (coordinates, polynomi-
als, determinants,. . .) that are used to represent them. Most part of the book
will be about surprisingly elegant ways of expressing geometric operations or
relations by algebraic formulas. We will in particular focus on understanding
the geometry of real and of complex spaces. In the same way as the concept
of complex numbers explains many of the seemingly complicated effects for
real situations (for instance in calculus, algebra or complex function theory),
studying the complex projective world will give surprising insights in the ge-
ometry over the real numbers (which to a large extend governs our real life).
12 2 Projective planes

The usual study of Euclidean geometry leads to a treatment of special

cases at a very early stage. Two lines may intersect or not depending on
whether they are parallel or not. Two circles may intersect or not depending
on their radii and on the position of their midpoints. In fact, already these two
effects lead to a variety of special cases in constructions and theorems all over
euclidean geometry. The treatment of these special cases often unnecessary
obscures the beauty of the underlying structures. Our aim in this book is to
derive statements and formulas that are elegant, general and carry as much
geometric information as possible. Here we do not strive for complicated for-
mulas but for formulas that carry much structural insight and often simplicity.
In a sense this book is written in the spririt of Julius Plücker (1801–1868) who
was as Felix Klein expressed it a master of “reading in the equations”.
Starting from the usual Euclidean Plane we will see that there are two
essential extensions needed to bypass the special situations described in the
last paragraph. First, one has to introduce elements at infinity. These elements
at infinity will nicely unify special cases that come from parallel situations.
Second (in the latter part of this book) we will study the geometry over
complex numbers since they allow us to treat also intersections of circles, that
are distinct from each other in real space.

2.1 Drawings and perspectives

• In the Garden of Eden, God is giving Adam a

geometry lesson: ”Two parallel lines intersect at
infinity. It can’t be proved but I’ve been there.”

• If parallel lines meet at infinity - infinity must be a

very noisy place with all those lines crashing together!

Two math jokes from a website

It was one of the major achievements of the Renaissance period of painting

to understand the laws of perspective drawing. If you try to produce a two-
dimensional image if a three dimensional object (say a cube or a pyramid),
the lines of the drawing cannot be in arbitrary position. Lines that are parallel
in the original scene must either be parallel or meet in a point in the picture.
Lines that meet in a point in the original scene have either to meet in a point in
the drawing or they may become parallel in the picture for very specific choices
of the viewpoint. The artists of that time (among others Durer, Da Vinci and
Raphael) used these principles to produce (for the standards of that time)
stunningly realistic looking images of buildings, towns and other sceneries. The
 2.1 Drawings and perspectives 13

Fig. 2.1. A page of Durer’s book

principles developed at this time still form the bases of most computer created
photorealistic images even nowadays. The basic idea is simple. To produce a
two-dimensional drawing of a three dimensional scene fix the position of the
canvas and the position of the viewers eye in space. For each point on the
canvas consider a line from the viewers eye through this point and plot a dot
according to the object that your ray meets first (compare Figure 2.1).
By this procedure a line in object space is in general mapped to a line in
the picture. One may think of this process in the following way: Any point in
object space is connected to the viewpoint by a line. The intersection of this
line with the canvas gives the image of the point. For any line in object space
we consider the plane spanned by this line and the viewpoint (if the line does
not pass through the viewpoint this plane is unique). The intersection of this
plane and the canvas plane is the image of the line. This simple construction
principle implies that – almost obviously – incidences of points and lines are
preserved by the mapping process and that lines are again mapped to lines.
Parallelism, orthogonality, distances and angles, however, are not preserved
by this process. So it may happen that lines that were parallel in object space
are mapped to concurrent lines in the image space. Two pictures in which this
construction principles are carried out in a vary strict sense are reproduced
in Figure 2.2.
14 2 Projective planes

Fig. 2.2. Two copperplates of the dutch graphic artist M.C.Escher

A first systematical treatment of the mathematical laws of perspective

drawings was undertaken by the french architect and engineer Girard Desar-
gues (1591 – 1661) and later by his student Blaise Pascal (1623 – 1662). They
laid foundations of the discipline that we today call projective geometry. Un-
fortunately many of their geometric investigations have not bee nanticipated
by the mathematicians of their time, since approximately at the same time
Réne Descartes (1596-1650) published his groundbreaking work La géométrie
which at the first time intimitely related the concepts of algebra and geom-
etry by introducing a coordinate system (this is why we speak of “Cartesian
Coordinates”). It was almost 150 later that large parts of projective geometry
were rediscovered by the frenchmen Gaspard Monge (1746 – 1818) who was
among other duties draftsman, lecturer, minister and a strong supporter of
Napolen Bon Aparte and his revolution. His mathematical investigations had
very practical backgrounds since they were at least partially directly related to
mechanics, architecture and military applications. 1790 Monge wrote a book
on what we today would call constructive or descriptive geometry. This dis-
cipline deals with the problem of making exact two-dimensional construction
sketches of three dimensional objects. Monge introduced a method (which in
essence is still used today by architects or mechanical engineers) of providing
different interrelated perspective drawings of a three dimensional object in a
predefined way, such that the three dimensional object is uniquely determined
by the sketches. Monges method usually projects an object parallel to two or
three distinct canvases that are orthogonal to each other. Thus the planar
sketch contains, for instance a front view, a side view and as top view of the
same object. The line in which the two canvases intersect is identified and
 2.1 Drawings and perspectives 15

Fig. 2.3. Monge view of a square in space.

commonly used in both perspective drawings. For an example of this method

consider Figure 2.3
Monge made the exciting observation that relations between geometric
objects in space and their perspective drawings may lead to genuinely pla-
nar theorems. These planar theorems can be entirely interpreted in the plane
and need no further reference to the original spatial object. For instance con-
sider the triangle in space (see Figure 2.4). Assume that a triangle A, B, C
is projected to two different mutually perpendicular projection planes. The
vertices of the triangle are mapped to points A! , B ! , C ! and A!! , B !! , C !! in
the projection planes. Furthermore assume that the plane that supports the
triangle contains the line ! in which the two projection planes meet. Under
this condition the images ab! and ab!! of the line supporting the edge AB will
also intersect in the line !. The same holds for the images ac! and ac!! and
for bc! and bc!! . Now let us assume that we are trying to construct such a
descriptive geometry drawing without reference to the spatial triangle. The
fact that ab! and ab!! meet in ! can be interpreted as the fact that the spatial
line AB meets !. Similarly, the fact that ac! and ac!! meet in ! corresponds to
the fact that the spatial line AC meets !. However, this already implies that
the plane that supports the triangle contains !. Hence, line BC has to meet !
as well and therefore bc! and bc!! also will meet in !. Thus the last coincidence
in the theorem will occur automatically. In other words, in the drawing the
last coincidence of lines occurs automatically. In fact, this special situation is
nothing else than Desargues’s Theorem that was discovered almost 200 years
earlier.
Our starting point, and the last person of our little historical review
was Monge’s student Jean-Victor Poncelet (1788-1867). He took up Monge’s
ideas and elaborated on them on a more abstract level. In 1822 he finished
his “Traité des propriétés projectives des figures”. In this monumental work
(about 1200 big foliant pages) he investigated those properties which remain
16 2 Projective planes

A!

B!
C!

C !!
PSfrag replacements !!
B

A!!

Fig. 2.4. Monge view of a triangle in space

invariant under projection. This two volume book contains fundamental ideas
of projective geometry such as the cross-ratio, perspective, involution and the
circular points at infinity, that we will meet in many situations troughout the
rest of this book. Poncelet was the first one who consequently made use of
elements at infinity which form the basis of all the elegant treatments that we
will encounter later on.

2.2 The axioms

What happens if we try to untangle planar Euclidean Geometry by eliminating
special cases arising from parallelism. In Euclidean Geometry two distinct lines
intersect unless they are parallel. Now in the setup of projective geometry one
enlarges the geometric setup by claiming that two distinct lines will always
intersect. Even if they are parallel they have an intersection – we just don’t
see it. In the axiomatic approach a Projective Plane is defined in the following
way.

Definition 2.1. A projective plane is a triple (P, L, I). The set P are the
points, and the set L are the lines of the geometry. I ⊆ P × L is an incidence
relation satisfying the following three axioms:
(i) For any two distinct points, there is exactly one line incident with both of
them.
(ii) For any two distinct lines, there is exactly one point incident with both of
them.
(iii)There are four points such that no line is incident with more than two of
them.
 2.2 The axioms 17

unique
PSfrag replacements PSfrag replacements
line PSfrag replacements
unique
line line
point unique point such points
such points such points point exist
exist exist

Fig. 2.5. The Axioms of projective geometry.

Observe that the first two axioms describe a completely symmetric rela-
tion of points and lines. The second axiom simply states that (without any
exception) two distinct lines will always intersect in a unique point. The first
axiom states that (without any exception) two distinct points will always have
a line joining them. The third axiom merely ensures that the structure is not
a degenerate trivial case in which most of the points are collinear.
It is the aim of this and the following section to give various models for this
axiom system. Let us first see how the usual Euclidean plane can be extended
to a projective plane in a natural way by including elements at infinity. Let
E = (PE , LE , IE ) be the usual Euclidean plane with points PE , lines LE and the
usual incidence relation LE of the euclidean plane. We can easily identify PE
with R2 . Now let us introduce the elements at infinity. For a line l consider the
equivalence class [l] of all lines that are parallel to l. For each such equivalence
class we define a new point p[l] . This point will play the role of the point at
infinity in which all the parallels contained in the equivalence class [l] shall
meet. This point is supposed to be incident with all lines of [l] Furthermore
we define one line at infinity l∞ . All points p[l] are supposed to be incident
with this line. More formally we set:
!
• P = PE ∪ {p[l] ! l ∈ LE },
• L = LE ∪ {l∞ },
! !
• I = IE ∪ {(p[l] , l) ! l ∈ LE } ∪ {(p[l] , l∞ ) ! l ∈ LE }.
It is easy to verify that this system (P, L, I) satisfies the axioms of a
projective plane. Let us start with axiom (ii). Two distinkt lines l1 and l2
have a point in common: If l1 and 2 are non-parallel euclidean lines, then this
intersection is simply their usual euclidean intersection. If they are parallel
it is the corresponding unique point p[l1 ] (which is identical to p[l2 ] ). The
intersection of l∞ with an euclidean line l is the point at infinity p[l] “on”
that line. The second axiom is also easy to check: the unique lines incident
to two euclidean points p1 and p2 is simply the euclidean line between them.
The line that joins a euclidean point p and an infinite point p∞ is the unique
line l through p with the property that p∞ = p[l] . Last but not least the line
18 2 Projective planes

incident to two distinct infinite points is the line at infinity l∞ itself. This
completes the considerations for Axiom (i) and Axiom (ii). Axiom (iii), is
evidently satisfied. For this one has simply to pick four points of an arbitrary
proper rectangle.

Fig. 2.6. Sketch of some lines in the projective extension of euclidean geometry

Figure 2.6 (left) symbolizes three bundles of parallels in the euclidean

plane. Figure 2.6 (right) indicates how these lines projectively meet in a point
and how all these points lie together on the line at infinity (drawn as a large
circle). Looking at the process of extending the euclidean plane to a projective
plane it may seem that the points at infinity and the line at infinity play a spe-
cial role. We will later on see that this is by far not the case. In a certain sense
the projective extension of a euclidean plane is even more symmetric than the
usual euclidean plane itself, since it allows for even more automorphisms.

2.3 The smallest projective plane

The concept of projective planes as setup by our three axioms is a very general
one. The projective extension of the real euclidean plane is by far not the only
model of the axiom system. In fact, still today there is no final classification
or enumeration of all possible projective planes. Projective planes do not even
have to be infinite objects. There are interesting systems of finitely many
points and lines that perfectly satisfy the axioms of a projective plane. To
get a feeling for these structures we will briefly construct and encounter a few
small examples.
 2.3 The smallest projective plane 19

What is the smallest projective plane? Axiom (iii) tells us that it must
at least contain four points, no three of which are collinear. So let us start
with four points and search for the smallest system of points and lines that
contains these points and at the same time satisfies axioms (i) and (ii). Let
the four points be A, B, C and D. By axiom (ii) any" pair # of these points
has to be connected by a line. This generates exaclty 42 = 6 lines. Axiom
(i) requires that any pair of such lines do intersect. There are exacly three
missing intersections. Namely those of the pairs of lines (AB, CD), (AC, BD)
and (AD, BC). This gives additional three points that must necessarily exist.
Now again axiom (i) requires that any pair of points is joined by a line. The
only pairs of points that are not joined so far are those formed by the lastly
added three points. We can satisfy the axioms by simply adding one line that
contains exactly these three points.

Fig. 2.7. Construction of a small projective plane

The final construction contains seven points and seven lines and is called
the Fano Plane. There are a few interesting observations that can be made in
this example.
• There are exacly as many lines as there are points in the drawing.
• On each line there is exactly the same number of points (here 3).
• Through each point passes exactly the same number of lines.
Each of these statements generalizes to general finite projective planes, as
the following propositions show. We first fix some notation. ! Let (P, L, I) be
a projective plane. For a line l ∈ L let p(l) =! {p ∈ P !pIl} be the points
on l and for a point p ∈ P let l(p) = {l ∈ L!pIl} be the lines through p.
Furthermore, we agree on a few linguistic conventions. Since in a projective
plane the line l that is at the same time incident to two points p and q is
by axiom (i) uniquely determined we will use a more functional rather tham
set-theoretic language and simply speek of the join of the two points. We will
express this join operation by p ∨ q or by join(p, q). Similarly, we will call the
unique point incident with two lines l and m the meet or intersection of these
lines and denote the corresponding operation by l ∧ m or by meet(l, m). We
also say sat a line l contains a point p if it is incident with it.
20 2 Projective planes

PSfrag replacements

q l

a4
a3
a2 b4 m
a1 b3
b2
b1
p

Fig. 2.8. The proof that all lines have the same number of points.

Lemma 2.1. If for p, q ∈ P and l, m ∈ L we have pIl, qIl, pIm and qIm
then either p = q or l = m.

Proof. Assume that pIl, qIl, pIm and qIm. If p '= q axiom (i) implies that
l = m. )
(

Lemma 2.2. Every line of a projective plane is incident with at least three
points.

Proof. Let l ∈ L be any line of the projective plane and assume on the contrary
that l does contain less than three points. Let a, b, c and d be the points of
Axiom (iii). Assume w.l.o.g. that a and b are not on l. Consider the lines a ∨ b,
a ∨ c, a ∨ d. Since these all pass through a they must be distinct by axiom (iii)
and must by Lemma 2.1 have three distinct intersections with l. )
(

Lemma 2.3. For every point p there is at least one line not incident with p.

Proof. Let p be any point. Let l and m be arbitrary lines. Either one if them
is does not contain p (then we are done), or we have p = l ∧ m. By the last
lemma there is a point pl on l distict from p, and a point pm on m distinct
from p. The join of these two points cannot contain p since this would violate
axiom (i). )
(

Theorem 2.1. Let (P, L, I) be a projective plane with finite sets P and L.
Then there exists a number n ∈ N such that |p(l)| = n + 1 for any l ∈ L and
|l(p)| = n + 1 for any p ∈ P.

Proof. Let l and m be two distinct lines. Assume that l contains k points. We
will prove that both lines contain the same number of points. Let p = l ∧ m
 2.3 The smallest projective plane 21

be their intersection and let ! be a line through p distinct from l and m.

Now consider a point q on ! distinct from p, which exists by Lemma 2. Let
{a1 , a2 , . . . , an } = p(l) − {p} be the points on l distinct from p and consider
the n − 1 lines lines li = pi ∨ q; i = 1, . . . , n. Each of these lines intersects
the line m in a point bi = li ∧ m. All these points have to be distinct, since
otherwise there would be lines li , lj that intersect twice in contradicion to
Lemma 1. Thus the number of points on m is as least as big as the number of
points on l. Similarly, we can argue that the number of points on l is as least
as big as the number of points on m. Hence both numbers have to be equal.
Thus the number of points on a line is the same for any line (see Figure 2.3).
Now let p be any point and l be a line that does not contain p. Let
{p1 , p2 , . . . , pn } be the n points on l. Joining these points with p gener-
ates k lines through p. In fact, this must be all lines through p since any line
through p must have an intersection with l by axiom (ii). Hence the number
of lines that pass through our (arbitrarily chosen) point p must also be equal
to k. )
(

The number n of the last proposition (which was the number of points
on a line minus one) is usually called the order of the projective plane. The
following proposition relates the order and the overall number of points and
lines in a finite projective plane.

Theorem 2.2. Let (P, L, I) be a projective plane with finite sets P and L of
order n. Then we have |P| = |L| = n2 + n + 1.

Proof. The last proposition proved that the number of points on each line is
n + 1 and the number of lines through each point is also n + 1. Let p be any
point of the projective plane. Each of the n + 1 lines through p contains n
additional points. They must all be distinct, since otherwise two of these lines
intersect twice. We have alltogether (n + 1) · n + 1 = n2 + n + 1 points. A
similar count proves that the number of lines is the same. )
(

So far we know two examples of a projective plane. One is the finite Fano
Plane of order 2, the other (infinite example) was the projective extension of
the real numbers. Our next chapter will show, that both can be considered as
special examples of a construction that generates a projective plane for every
number field.