Hyperbolic Motion

Hyperbolic Motion

In geometry, hyperbolic motions are isometric automorphisms of a hyperbolic space. Under composition of mappings, the hyperbolic motions form a continuous group. This group is said to characterize the hyperbolic space. Such an approach to geometry was cultivated by Felix Klein in his Erlangen program. The idea of reducing geometry to its characteristic group was developed particularly by Mario Pieri in his reduction of the primitive notions of geometry to merely point and motion.

Hyperbolic motions are in fact taken from inversive geometry: these are mappings composed of reflections in a line or a circle (or in a hyperplane or a hypersphere for hyperbolic spaces of more than two dimensions). To distinguish the hyperbolic motions, a particular line or circle is taken as the absolute. The proviso is that the absolute must be an invariant set of all hyperbolic motions. The absolute divides the plane into two connected components, and hyperbolic motions must not permute these components.

One of the most prevalent contexts for inversive geometry and hyperbolic motions is in the study of mappings of the complex plane by Mobius transformations. Textbooks on complex functions often mention two common models of hyperbolic geometry: the Poincaré half-plane model where the absolute is the real line on the complex plane, and the Poincaré disk model where the absolute is the unit circle in the complex plane.

This article exhibits these examples of the use of hyperbolic motions: the extension of the metric to the half-plane, and in the location of a quasi-sphere of a hypercomplex number system.