In mathematics, the Erlangen program is a method of characterizing geometries based on group theory and projective geometry. It was published by Felix Klein in 1872 as Vergleichende Betrachtungen über neuere geometrische Forschungen. It is named after the University Erlangen-Nürnberg, where Klein worked.
By 1872, non-Euclidean geometries had emerged, but without a way to determine their hierarchy and relationships. Klein's method was fundamentally innovative in three ways:
Projective geometry was emphasized as the unifying frame for all other geometries considered by him. In particular, Euclidean geometry was more restrictive than affine geometry, which in turn is more restrictive than projective geometry.
Klein proposed that group theory, a branch of mathematics that uses algebraic methods to abstract the idea of symmetry, was the most useful way of organizing geometrical knowledge; at the time it had already been introduced into the theory of equations in the form of Galois theory.
Klein made much more explicit the idea that each geometrical language had its own, appropriate concepts, thus for example projective geometry rightly talked about conic sections, but not about circles or angles because those notions were not invariant under projective transformations (something familiar in geometrical perspective). The way the multiple languages of geometry then came back together could be explained by the way subgroups of a symmetry group related to each other.
Later, Élie Cartan generalized Klein's homogeneous model spaces to Cartan connections on certain principal bundles, which generalized Riemannian geometry.
The problems of nineteenth century geometry
Since Euclid, geometry had meant the geometry of Euclidean space of two dimensions (plane geometry) or of three dimensions (solid geometry). In the first half of the nineteenth century there had been several developments complicating the picture. Mathematical applications required geometry of four or more dimensions; the close scrutiny of the foundations of the traditional Euclidean geometry had revealed the independence of the parallel postulate from the others, and non-Euclidean geometry had been born. Klein proposed an idea that all these new geometries are just special cases of the projective geometry, as already developed by Poncelet, Möbius, Cayley and others. Klein also strongly suggested to mathematical physicists that even a moderate cultivation of the projective purview might bring substantial benefits to them.
With every geometry, Klein associated an underlying group of symmetries. The hierarchy of geometries is thus mathematically represented as a hierarchy of these groups, and hierarchy of their invariants. For example, lengths, angles and areas are preserved with respect to the Euclidean group of symmetries, while only the incidence structure and the cross-ratio are preserved under the most general projective transformations. A concept of parallelism, which is preserved in affine geometry, is not meaningful in projective geometry. Then, by abstracting the underlying groups of symmetries from the geometries, the relationships between them can be re-established at the group level. Since the group of affine geometry is a subgroup of the group of projective geometry, any notion invariant in projective geometry is a priori meaningful in affine geometry; but not the other way round. If you remove required symmetries, you have a more powerful theory but fewer concepts and theorems (which will be deeper and more general).
Homogeneous spaces
In other words, the "traditional spaces" are homogeneous spaces; but not for a uniquely determined group. Changing the group changes the appropriate geometric language.
In today's language, the groups concerned in classical geometry are all very well known as Lie groups: the classical groups. The specific relationships are quite simply described, using technical language.
Examples
For example, the group of projective geometry in n real-valued dimensions is the symmetry group of n-dimensional real projective space (the general linear group of degree , quotiented by scalar matrices). The affine group will be the subgroup respecting (mapping to itself, not fixing pointwise) the chosen hyperplane at infinity. This subgroup has a known structure (semidirect product of the general linear group of degree n with the subgroup of translations). This description then tells us which properties are 'affine'. In Euclidean plane geometry terms, being a parallelogram is affine since affine transformations always take one parallelogram to another one. Being a circle is not affine since an affine shear will take a circle into an ellipse.
