What is (a) geometry?

According to Klein, geometry can be viewed as the action of a group on a space, be it smooth or finite. See this. That is, a geometry on a set $X$ is a triple $(X,G,A)$, where $G$ is a group with action $A$ on $X$.


Usually, geometry consists of an underlying topological space (a manifold, for example) and some structure on this space. The structure is an analogy of some tool – such as a ruler or compass – that enables you to see more than what the topology sees. It might be something that enables you, for example, to “measure angles and distances” (Riemannian geometry), or “just to measure angles” (Conformal geometry), or “to see what are lines and what are not lines” (Projective geometry), or some other, more abstract analog of a “ruler and compass”.

From what I have learned, the Cartan geometry – which defines geometry as a principal bundle over a manifold with some Cartan connection – generalizes both Kleinian and Riemannian geometry in some sense; one book where this is explained is Sharpe: Cartan's generalization of Klein's Erlangen program.

The reason why there is not a single universal definition, unlike in topology, is the immense history of geometry (2500 years, compared to 100 years of topology).


The answer to your question, "Is there a thorough and generally agreed upon definition of a geometry", is negative: There is no such definition. For instance, Klein's viewpoint (from 1872), was outdated by the time it was proposed, as it did not cover the emerging Riemannian geometry which was (at the time) in its infancy, as well as algebraic geometry which, at the time, was vigorously developed by the Italian school (and Cayley and many others). What's worse, Klein did not even cover Gauss' intrinsic geometry of surfaces which was, by that time, reasonable well-established.

At best, one can give an (admittedly incomplete) list several branches of mathematics, which name themselves geometry:

  1. Metric geometry.

  2. Riemannian geometry.

  3. Pseudo-Riemannian geometry.

  4. Symplectic geometry.

  5. Contact geometry.

  6. Geometry of foliations.

  7. Study of locally-homogeneous geometric structures in the sense of Ehresmann (e.g., flat projective structures, flat affine structures, etc).

  8. Incidence geometry and geometry of buildings a la J.Tits.

  9. Algebraic geometry.

  10. Noncommutative geometry of A.Connes.

Many (items 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), but definitely not not all, of these geometries, can be put under the umbrella of Cartan's definition of a geometric structure as a smooth $n$-manifold $M$ equipped with a reduction of the frame bundle to its $G$-subbundle, where $G$ is a closed subgroup of $GL(n,R)$.

(Klein's proposed definition of geometry fits as a small subfield of all of these items; it deals exclusively with, what we now call, homogeneous spaces.)

All these fields have some common features and, yet, resist a common definition. The suggested definition by Lurie, is primarily driven by algebro-geometric considerations and applications and is too broad to separate "geometry" from "topology" (the category of topological spaces will fit comfortably into Lurie's framework).

Edit. Simons Center for Geometry and Physics has a page aptly named "What is Geometry?" which has several prominent geometers, topologists and physicists trying to answer the title question (Sullivan, Donaldson, Vafa...) and (not surprisingly) failing to come up with anything close to an answer. (Although, I'd say, Fukaya comes closest.)

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Geometry