Die Oktavenebene als Translationsebene mit großer Kollineationsgruppe

Abstract

The Cayley Plane as a Translation Plane with a Large Collineation Group. It is shown that the affine plane over the Cayley numbers is the only 16-dimensional locally compact topological translation plane having a collineation group of dimension at least 41. This (hitherto unpublished) result is one of the ingredients of H. Salzmann's characterizations of the Cayley plane among general compact projective planes by the size of its collineation group. The proof involves various case studies of the possibilities for the structure and size of collineation groups of 16-dimensional locally compact translation planes. At the same time, these case studies are important steps for a classification program aiming at the explicit determination of all such translation planes having a collineation group of dimension at least 38.