MHC MATH CLUBSPRING 2004

Where the railroad tracks meet:
an introduction to the (finite) projective plane

Harriet Pollatsek
Mt. Holyoke College

What happens if we throw away the parallel postulate and assume parallel lines "meet at infinity"? And on top of that, what if there are only finitely many points? Questions like these lead us to a finite geometry with connections to experimental design via Latin squares. Along the way, we'll see that sometimes even the great Euler can be really, really wrong.