The geometry of lines occurs naturally in such different areas as sculptured surface machining, computation of offsets and medial axes, surface reconstruction for reverse engineering, geometrical optics, kinematics and motion design, and modeling of developable surfaces. This book covers line geometry from various viewpoints and aims towards computation and visualization. Besides applications, it contains a tutorial on projective geometry and an introduction into the theory of smooth and algebraic manifolds of lines. It will be useful to researchers, graduate students, and anyone interested either in the theory or in computational aspects in general, or in applications in particular.

This textbook is a comprehensive and yet accessible introduction to non-Euclidean Laguerre geometry, for which there exists no previous systematic presentation in the literature. Moreover, we present new results by demonstrating all essential features of Laguerre geometry on the example of checkerboard incircular nets. Classical (Euclidean) Laguerre geometry studies oriented hyperplanes, oriented hyperspheres, and their oriented contact in Euclidean space. We describe how this can be generalized to arbitrary Cayley-Klein spaces, in particular hyperbolic and elliptic space, and study the corresponding groups of Laguerre transformations. We give an introduction to Lie geometry and describe how these Laguerre geometries can be obtained as subgeometries. As an application of two-dimensional Lie and Laguerre geometry we study the properties of checkerboard incircular nets.

From the reviews: " A unique and fascinating blend, which is shown to be useful for a variety of applications, including robotics, geometrical optics, computer animation, and geometric design. The contents of the book are visualized by a wealth of carefully chosen illustrations, making the book a shear pleasure to read, or even to just browse in." Mathematical Reviews