structural:expansion, structural:reformatting, structural:scholar_edition
Finite field planes

By Wedderburn's Theorem, a finite division ring must be commutative and so be a field. Thus, the finite examples of this construction are known as "field planes". Taking K to be the finite field of q = p elements with prime p produces a projective plane of q + q + 1 points. The field planes are usually denoted by PG(2, q) where PG stands for projective geometry, the "2" is the dimension and q is called the order of the plane (it is one less than the number of points on any line). The Fano plane, discussed below, is denoted by PG(2, 2). The third example above is the projective plane PG(2, 3).

The Fano plane is the projective plane arising from the field of two elements. It is the smallest projective plane, with only seven points and seven lines. In the figure at right, the seven points are shown as small balls, and the seven lines are shown as six line segments and a circle. However, one could equivalently consider the balls to be the "lines" and the line segments and circle to be the "points" – this is an example of duality in the projective plane: if the lines and points are interchanged, the result is still a projective plane (see below). A permutation of the seven points that carries collinear points (points on the same line) to collinear points is called a collineation or symmetry of the plane. The collineations of a geometry form a group under composition, and for the Fano plane this group (PΓL(3, 2) = PGL(3, 2)) has 168 elements.