Whitehead's point-free geometry

In mathematics, point-free geometry is a geometry whose primitive ontological notion is region rather than point. Two axiomatic systems are set out below, one grounded in mereology, the other in mereotopology and known as connection theory.

Point-free geometry was first formulated by Alfred North Whitehead,[1] not as a theory of geometry or of spacetime, but of "events" and of an "extension relation" between events. Whitehead's purposes were as much philosophical as scientific and mathematical.[2]

  1. ^ Whitehead (1919, 1920)
  2. ^ See Kneebone (1963), chpt. 13.5, for a gentle introduction to Whitehead's theory. Also see Lucas (2000), chpt. 10.