Affine Geometry - Affine Space

Affine Space

Affine geometry can be viewed as the geometry of an affine space of a given dimension n, coordinatized over a field K. There is also (in two dimensions) a combinatorial generalization of coordinatized affine space, as developed in synthetic finite geometry. In projective geometry, affine space means the complement of a hyperplane at infinity in a projective space. Affine space can also be viewed as a vector space whose operations are limited to those linear combinations whose coefficients sum to one, for example 2x−y, x−y+z, (x+y+z)/3, ix+(1-i)y, etc.

Synthetically, affine planes are 2-dimensional affine geometries defined in terms of the relations between points and lines (or sometimes, in higher dimensions, hyperplanes). Defining affine (and projective) geometries as configurations of points and lines (or hyperplanes) instead of using coordinates, one gets examples with no coordinate fields. A major property is that all such examples have dimension 2. Finite examples in dimension 2 (finite affine planes) have been valuable in the study of configurations in infinite affine spaces, in group theory, and in combinatorics.

Despite being less general than the configurational approach, the other approaches discussed have been very successful in illuminating the parts of geometry that are related to symmetry.