Just at this time I left Caen, where I was then living, to go on a geological excursion under the auspices of the school of mines. The changes of travel made me forget my mathematical work. Having reached Coutances, we entered an omnibus to go some place or other. At the moment when I put my foot on the step the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it, that the transformations I had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical with those of non-Euclidean geometry. I did not verify the idea; I should not have had time, as, upon taking my seat in the omnibus, I went on with a conversation already commenced, but I felt a perfect certainty. On my return to Caen, for conscience’ sake I verified the result at my leisure. -Henri Poincaré, Science and Method

You’re out for a walk one day, contemplating the world, and you suddenly have an out-of-body experience, your perspective floating high above your corporeal self. As you rise, everything seems perfectly normal at first, but, when you reach a sufficient altitude, you notice something strange: your body appears to be at the center of a perfect circle, beyond which there is simply…nothing!

You watch yourself walk towards the edge of the circle. It initially looks like you will reach the edge in a surprisingly short amount of time, but, as you continue watching, you notice yourself getting smaller and slowing down. By the time you are halfway to the edge, you are moving at only 3/4 of your original speed. When you are 3/4 of the way to the edge, you are moving at only 7/16 of your original speed. Maybe you will never reach the edge after all? What is happening?

At some point, you see your physical self notice some friends, standing some distance away in the circle. You wave to one another, and your friends beckon you over. You start walking toward them, but, strangely, you walk in what looks not to be a straight line but rather an arc, curving in towards the center of the circle before curving outward again to meet your friends. And, equally curiously, your friends don’t appear to be surprised or annoyed by your seemingly inefficient route. You puzzle things over for a few seconds before having a moment of insight. ‘Oh!’ you think. ‘My physical body is living on a Poincaré disk model for hyperbolic geometry, which my mind has somehow transcended during this out-of-body experience. Of course!”

The Poincaré disk model, which was actually put forth by Eugenio Beltrami, is one of the first and, to my mind, most elegant models of non-Euclidean geometry. Recall from our previous post that a Euclidean geometry is a geometry satisfying Euclid’s five postulates. The first four of these postulates are simple and self-evident. The fifth, known as the Parallel Postulate (recall also that two lines are parallel if they do not intersect), is unsatisfyingly complex and non-immediate. To refresh our memories, here is an equivalent form of the Parallel Postulate, known as Playfair’s Axiom:

Given any line and any point not on , there is exactly one line through that is parallel to .

A non-Euclidean geometry is a geometry that satisfies the first four postulates of Euclid but fails to satisfy the Parallel Postulate. Non-Euclidean geometries began to be seriously investigated in the 19th century; Beltrami, working in the context of Euclidean geometry, was the first to actually produce models of non-Euclidean geometry, thus proving that, supposing Euclidean geometry is consistent, then so is non-Euclidean geometry.

The Poincaré disk model, one of Beltrami’s models, is a model for hyperbolic geometry, in which the Parallel Postulate is replaced by the following statement:

Given any line and any point not on , there are at least two distinct lines through that are parallel to .

Points and lines are the basic objects of geometry, so, to describe the Poincaré disk model, we must first describe the set of points and lines of the model. The set of points of the model is the set of points strictly inside a given circle. For concreteness, let us suppose we are working on the Cartesian plane, and let us take the unit circle, i.e., the circle of radius one, centered at the origin, as our given circle. The points in the Poincaré disk model are then the points in the plane whose distances from the origin are strictly less than one.

Lines in the Poincaré disk model (which we will sometimes call hyperbolic lines) are arcs formed by taking one of the following type of objects and intersecting it with the unit disk:

Straight lines (in the Euclidean sense) through the center of the circle. Circles (in the Euclidean sense) that are perpendicular to the unit circle.

(These can, of course, be seen as two instances of the same thing, if one takes the viewpoint that, in Euclidean space, straight lines are just circles of infinite radius.)

It’s already pretty easy to see that this geometry satisfies our hyperbolic replacement of the Parallel Postulate. In fact, given a line and a point not on there are infinitely many lines through parallel to . Here’s an illustration of a typical case, with three parallel lines drawn:

We’re not quite able right now to prove that the disk model satisfies the first four of Euclid’s postulates, in part because we haven’t yet specified what it means for two line segments in the model to be be congruent (we don’t, for example, have a notion of distance in our model yet). We’ll get to this in just a minute, but let us first show that our model satisfies the first postulate: Given any two distinct points, there is a line containing both of them.

To this end, let and be two points in the disk. If the (Euclidean) line that contains and passes through the center of the disk, then this is also a line in the disk model, and we are done. Otherwise, the (Euclidean) line that contains and does not pass through the center of the disk. In this case, we use the magic of circle inversion, which we saw in a previous post. Let by the result of inverting across the unit circle. Now , , and are distinct points in the Cartesian plane, so there is a unique circle (call it ) containing all three. Since and are both on the circle, it is perpendicular to the unit circle. Therefore, its intersection with the unit disk is a line in the disk model containing both and Here’s a picture:

We turn now to distance in the Poincaré disk model. And here, for the sake of brevity, I’m not even going to try to explain why things are they way they are but will just give you a formula. Given two points and in the disk, consider the hyperbolic line containing them, and let and be the points where this line meets the boundary circle (with closer to and closer to ). Then the hyperbolic distance between and is given by:

.

This is likely inscrutable right now. That’s fine. Let’s think about what it means for this to be the correct notion of distance, though. For one thing, it means that, given two points in the disk model, the shortest path between them is not, in general, the straight Euclidean line that connects them, but rather the hyperbolic line that connects them. This explains your body’s behavior in the story at the start of this post. When you were walking over to your friends, what appeared to your mind (which was outside the disk, in the Euclidean realm) as a curved arc, and therefore an inefficient path, was in fact a hyperbolic line and, because your body was inside the hyperbolic disk, the shortest path between you and your friends.

This notion of distance also means that distances inside the disk which appear equal to an external Euclidean observer in fact get longer and longer the closer they are to the edge of the disk. This is also consistent with the observations at the beginning of the post: as your body got further toward the edge of the disk, it appeared from an external viewpoint to be moving more and more slowly. From a viewpoint inside the disk, though, it was moving at constant speed and would never reach the edge of the disk, which is infinitely far away. The disk appears bounded from the external Euclidean view, but from within it is entirely unbounded and limitless.

Let’s close by looking at two familiar shapes, interpreted in the hyperbolic disk. First, circles. Recall that a circle is simply the set of points that are some fixed distance away from a given center. Now, what happens when we interpret this definition inside the hyperbolic disk? Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, we get Euclidean circles! (Sort of.) To be more precise, hyperbolic circles in the Poincaré disk model are precisely the Euclidean circles that lie entirely within the disk. (I’m not going to go through the tedious calculations to prove this; I’ll leave that up to you…) Beware, though! The hyperbolic center of the circle is generally different from the Euclidean center. (This should make sense if you think about our distance definition. The hyperbolic center will be further toward the edge of the disk than the Euclidean center, coinciding only if the Euclidean center of the circle is in fact the center of the hyperbolic disk.)

Next, triangles. A triangle is, of course, a polygon with three sides. This definition works perfectly fine in hyperbolic geometry; we simply require that our sides are hyperbolic line segments rather than Euclidean line segments. If we assume the first four of Euclid’s postulates, then the Parallel Postulate is actually equivalent to the statement that the sum of the interior angles of a triangle is 180 degrees. In the Poincaré disk model (and, in fact, in any model of hyperbolic geometry) all triangles have angles that sum to less than 180 degrees. This should be evident if we look at a typical triangle:

Things become interesting when you start to ask how much less than 180 degrees a hyperbolic triangle has. The remarkable fact is that the number of degrees in a hyperbolic triangle is dependent entirely on its (hyperbolic) area! The smaller a triangle is, the larger the sum of its interior angles: as triangles get smaller and smaller, approaching a single point, the sum of their angles approaches 180 degrees from below. Correspondingly, as triangles get larger, the sum of their angles approaches 0 degrees. In fact if we consider an “ideal triangle”, in which the three vertices are in fact points on the bounding circle (and thus not real points in the disk model), then the sum of the angles of this “triangle” is actually 0 degrees!

A consequence of this is the fact that, in the Poincaré disk model, if two triangles are similar, then they are in fact congruent!

This leads us to our final topic: one of the perks of living in a Poincaré disk model. Perhaps the most frequent complaint I hear from people living on a Euclidean plane is that there aren’t enough ways to tile the plane with triangles. Countless people come up to me and say, “Chris, I want to tile the plane with triangles, and I want this tiling to have the following two pleasing properties:

All of the triangles are congruent, they don’t overlap, and they fill the entire plane. At every vertex of the tiling, all angles meeting that vertex are the same.

But there are only four essentially different ways of doing this, and I’m tired of all of them! What should I do?”

(Exercise for the reader: Find all four such tilings!)

It just so happens that I have a simple answer for these people: “Move to a Poincaré disk model, where there are infinitely many tilings with these properties!” Here are just a few (all by Tamfang and in the public domain):

I’ll leave you with that! Hyperbolic geometry is fascinating, and I encourage you to investigate further on your own. The previous mentioned Euclid and Beyond, by Hartshorne, is a nice place to start.

This also wraps up (for now, at least) a couple of multi-part investigations here at Point at Infinity: a look at the interesting geometry of circles, which started in our post on circle inversion, and a look at various notions of independence in mathematics, the other posts being here and here. Join us next time for something new!

Cover Image: M. C. Escher, Circle Limit III