My 2018 Mathematics A To Z: Hyperbolic Half-Plane

Today’s term was one of several nominations I got for ‘H’. This one comes from John Golden, @mathhobre on Twitter and author of the Math Hombre blog on Blogspot. He brings in a lot of thought about mathematics education and teaching tools that you might find interesting or useful or, better, both.

Art by Thomas K Dye, creator of the web comics Newshounds, Something Happens, and Infinity Refugees. His current project is Projection Edge. And you can get Projection Edge six months ahead of public publication by subscribing to his Patreon. And he’s on Twitter as @Newshoundscomic.

Hyperbolic Half-Plane.

The half-plane part is easy to explain. By the “plane” mathematicians mean, well, the plane. What you’d get if a sheet of paper extended forever. Also if it had zero width. To cut it in half … well, first we have to think hard what we mean by cutting an infinitely large thing in half. Then we realize we’re overthinking this. Cut it by picking a line on the plane, and then throwing away everything on one side or the other of that line. Maybe throw away everything on the line too. It’s logically as good to pick any line. But there are a couple lines mathematicians use all the time. This is because they’re easy to describe, or easy to work with. At least once you fix an origin and, with it, x- and y-axes. The “right half-plane”, for example, is everything in the positive-x-axis direction. Every point with coordinates you’d describe with positive x-coordinate values. Maybe the non-negative ones, if you want the edge included. The “upper half plane” is everything in the positive-y-axis direction. All the points whose coordinates have a positive y-coordinate value. Non-negative, if you want the edge included. You can make guesses about what the “left half-plane” or the “lower half-plane” are. You are correct.

The “hyperbolic” part takes some thought. What is there to even exaggerate? Wrong sense of the word “hyperbolic”. The word here is the same one used in “hyperbolic geometry”. That takes explanation.

The Western mathematics tradition, as we trace it back to Ancient Greece and Ancient Egypt and Ancient Babylon and all, gave us “Euclidean” geometry. It’s a pretty good geometry. It describes how stuff on flat surfaces works. In the Euclidean formation we set out a couple of axioms that aren’t too controversial. Like, lines can be extended indefinitely and that all right angles are congruent. And one axiom that is controversial. But which turns out to be equivalent to the idea that there’s only one line that goes through a point and is parallel to some other line.

And it turns out that you don’t have to assume that. You can make a coherent “spherical” geometry, one that describes shapes on the surface of a … you know. You have to change your idea of what a line is; it becomes a “geodesic” or, on the globe, a “great circle”. And it turns out that there’s no lines geodesics that go through a point and that are parallel to some other line geodesic. (I know you want to think about globes. I do too. You maybe want to say the lines of latitude are parallel one another. They’re even called parallels, sometimes. So they are. But they’re not geodesics. They’re “little circles”. I am not throwing in ad hoc reasons I’m right and you’re not.)

There is another, though. This is “hyperbolic” geometry. This is the way shapes work on surfaces that mathematicians call saddle-shaped. I don’t know what the horse enthusiasts out there call these shapes. My guess is they chuckle and point out how that would be the most painful saddle ever. Doesn’t matter. We have surfaces. They act weird. You can draw, through a point, infinitely many lines parallel to a given other line.

That’s some neat stuff. That’s weird and interesting. They’re even called “hyperparallel lines” if that didn’t sound great enough. You can see why some people would find this worth studying. The catch is that it’s hard to order a pad of saddle-shaped paper to try stuff out on. It’s even harder to get a hyperbolic blackboard. So what we’d like is some way to represent these strange geometries using something easier to work with.

The hyperbolic half-plane is one of those approaches. This uses the upper half-plane. It works by a move as brilliant and as preposterous as that time Q told Data and LaForge how to stop that falling moon. “Simple. Change the gravitational constant of the universe.”

What we change here is the “metric”. The metric is a function. It tells us something about how points in a space relate to each other. It gives us distance. In Euclidean geometry, plane geometry, we use the Euclidean metric. You can find the distance between point A and point B by looking at their coordinates, and . This distance is . Don’t worry about the formulas. The lines on a sheet of graph paper are a reflection of this metric. Each line is (normally) a fixed distance from its parallel neighbors. (Yes, there are polar-coordinate graph papers. And there are graph papers with logarithmic or semilogarithmic spacing. I mean graph paper like you can find at the office supply store without asking for help.)

But the metric is something we choose. There are some rules it has to follow to be logically coherent, yes. But those rules give us plenty of room to play. By picking the correct metric, we can make this flat plane obey the same geometric rules as the hyperbolic surface. This metric looks more complicated than the Euclidean metric does, but only because it has more terms and takes longer to write out. What’s important about it is that the distance your thumb put on top of the paper covers up is bigger if your thumb is near the bottom of the upper-half plane than if your thumb is near the top of the paper.

So. There are now two things that are “lines” in this. One of them is vertical lines. The graph paper we would make for this has a nice file of parallel lines like ordinary paper does. The other thing, though … well, that’s half-circles. They’re half-circles with a center on the edge of the half-plane. So our graph paper would also have a bunch of circles, of different sizes, coming from regularly-spaced sources on the bottom of the paper. A line segment is a piece of either these vertical lines or these half-circles. You can make any polygon you like with these, if you pick out enough line segments. They’re there.

There are many ways to represent hyperbolic surfaces. This is one of them. It’s got some nice properties. One of them is that it’s “conformal”. Angles that you draw using this metric are the same size as those on the corresponding hyperbolic surface. You don’t appreciate how sweet that is until you’re working in non-Euclidean geometries. Circles that are entirely within the hyperbolic half-plane match to circles on a hyperbolic surface. Once you’ve got your intuition for this hyperbolic half-plane, you can step into hyperbolic half-volumes. And that lets you talk about the geometry of hyperbolic spaces that reach into four or more dimensions of human-imaginable spaces. Isometries — picking up a shape and moving it in ways that don’t change distance — match up with the Möbius Transformations. These are a well-understood set of altering planes that comes from a different corner of geometry. Also from that fellow with the strip, August Ferdinand Möbius. It’s always exciting to find relationships like that in mathematical structures.

Pictures often help. I don’t know why I don’t include them. But here is a web site with pages, and pictures, that describe much of the hyperbolic half-plane. It includes code to use with the Geometer Sketchpad software, which I have never used and know nothing about. That’s all right. There’s at least one page there showing a wondrous picture. I hope you enjoy.

---

This and other essays in the Fall 2018 A-To-Z should be at this link. And I’ll start paneling for more letters soon.