Friday, March 29, 2002 A304 Wells Hall:

• Abstract. A famous result in Algebra (and Geometry) asserts that there are only 4 projective planes (satisfying the usual axioms of incidence), namely the real, complex, quaternionic and Cayley planes. For the complex projective plane an old result shows that its quotient by complex conjugation is the 4-dimensional sphere. I will describe a generalization of this result to the quaternionic and Caylely planes. I will also describe a parallel result for the "complexification" of all the projective planes.
  

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Department of Mathematics
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824-1027
(517)355-9680
ginther@math.msu.edu
www.math.msu.edu/Lecture_Series