Some advances towards a purely geometrical justification of the use of unreal elements in projective geometry

1. Considerable advantage has resulted from the postulation of unreal elements in projective geometry. In the first place these unreal elements were defined in terms of points represented by complex coordinates, and their use in purely geometrical reasoning had become well established before any serious attempt was made to justify this use, independently of algebraic considerations, by providing real representations of the unreal elements. The first successful attempt was that of von Staudt, who represented an unreal element by an elliptic involution associated with an order. In this system an ordered set of four real points is required to specify an unreal point. The system is comparatively simple to deal with in a single real plane, more complicated in a single real [3], and rapidly increases in complexity as the number of dimensions of the real field is increased.