Homography
In projective geometry, a homography is an isomorphism of projective spaces, induced by an isomorphism of the vector spaces from which the projective spaces derive.[1] It is a bijection that maps lines to lines, and thus a collineation. In general, some collineations are not homographies, but the fundamental theorem of projective geometry asserts that is not so in the case of real projective spaces of dimension at least two. Synonyms include projectivity, projective transformation, and projective collineation.
This article is about the mathematical notion. For other uses, see Homography (disambiguation).
Historically, homographies (and projective spaces) have been introduced to study perspective and projections in Euclidean geometry, and the term homography, which, etymologically, roughly means "similar drawing", dates from this time. At the end of the 19th century, formal definitions of projective spaces were introduced, which extended Euclidean and affine spaces by the addition of new points called points at infinity. The term "projective transformation" originated in these abstract constructions. These constructions divide into two classes that have been shown to be equivalent. A projective space may be constructed as the set of the lines of a vector space over a given field (the above definition is based on this version); this construction facilitates the definition of projective coordinates and allows using the tools of linear algebra for the study of homographies. The alternative approach consists in defining the projective space through a set of axioms, which do not involve explicitly any field (incidence geometry, see also synthetic geometry); in this context, collineations are easier to define than homographies, and homographies are defined as specific collineations, thus called "projective collineations".
For sake of simplicity, unless otherwise stated, the projective spaces considered in this article are supposed to be defined over a (commutative) field. Equivalently Pappus's hexagon theorem and Desargues's theorem are supposed to be true. A large part of the results remain true, or may be generalized to projective geometries for which these theorems do not hold.
Homography groups[edit]
As every homography has an inverse mapping and the composition of two homographies is another, the homographies of a given projective space form a group. For example, the Möbius group is the homography group of any complex projective line.
As all the projective spaces of the same dimension over the same field are isomorphic, the same is true for their homography groups. They are therefore considered as a single group acting on several spaces, and only the dimension and the field appear in the notation, not the specific projective space.
Homography groups also called projective linear groups are denoted PGL(n + 1, F) when acting on a projective space of dimension n over a field F. Above definition of homographies shows that PGL(n + 1, F) may be identified to the quotient group GL(n + 1, F) / F×I, where GL(n + 1, F) is the general linear group of the invertible matrices, and F×I is the group of the products by a nonzero element of F of the identity matrix of size (n + 1) × (n + 1).
When F is a Galois field GF(q) then the homography group is written PGL(n, q). For example, PGL(2, 7) acts on the eight points in the projective line over the finite field GF(7), while PGL(2, 4), which is isomorphic to the alternating group A5, is the homography group of the projective line with five points.[12]
The homography group PGL(n + 1, F) is a subgroup of the collineation group PΓL(n + 1, F) of the collineations of a projective space of dimension n. When the points and lines of the projective space are viewed as a block design, whose blocks are the sets of points contained in a line, it is common to call the collineation group the automorphism group of the design.
