Beltrami’s Models of Non-Euclidean Geometry

Abstract

In two articles published in 1868 and 1869, Eugenio Beltrami provided three models in Euclidean plane (or space) for non-Euclidean geometry. Our main aim here is giving an extensive account of the two articles' content. We will also try to understand how the way Beltrami, especially in the first article, develops his theory depends on a changing attitude with regards to the definition of surface. In the end, an example from contemporary mathematics shows how the boundary at infinity of the non-Euclidean plane, which Beltrami made intuitively and mathematically accessible in his models, made non-Euclidean geometry a natural tool in the study of functions defined on the real line (or on the circle).