Binary Operations in the Unit Ball: A Differential Geometry Approach

Abstract

Within the framework of differential geometry, we study binary operations in the open, unit ball of the Euclidean n-space R n , n ∈ N , and discover the properties that qualify these operations to the title addition despite the fact that, in general, these binary operations are neither commutative nor associative. The binary operation of the Beltrami-Klein ball model of hyperbolic geometry, known as Einstein addition, and the binary operation of the Beltrami-Poincaré ball model of hyperbolic geometry, known as Möbius addition, determine corresponding metric tensors in the unit ball. For a variety of metric tensors, including these two, we show how binary operations can be recovered from metric tensors. We define corresponding scalar multiplications, which give rise to gyrovector spaces, and to norms in these spaces. We introduce a large set of binary operations that are algebraically equivalent to Einstein addition and satisfy a number of nice properties of this addition. For such operations we define sets of gyrolines and co-gyrolines. The sets of co-gyrolines are sets of geodesics of Riemannian manifolds with zero Gaussian curvatures. We also obtain a special binary operation in the ball, which is isomorphic to the Euclidean addition in the Euclidean n-space.