2025, October 17-18 ORESME Reading Group Meeting

Our 49th meeting will be held on Friday-Saturday, October 17-18, 2025, at Xavier University. We will take a look at a seminal work in the study and development of projective geometry by Jean-Victor Poncelet (1788--1867), his Traité des propriétés projectives des figures of 1822.

A good deal of prep work has gone into making this possible, as the Traité has not yet been published in an English edition, and the only comprehensive study of the history of projective geometry was published just this year by Springer! ORESME co-organizers Danny Otero and Dan Curtin, together with charter member Dick Pulskamp, collaborated to produce an English text of a workable set of excerpts from Poncelet's Traité for us to read. They worked from this second edition of the treatise (available at the Gallica archive of the Bibliotèque Nationale de France). Selections from the aforementioned history of projective geometry are also being shared to help provide with some context for our foray into Poncelet's work.

Our primary text is

• Selections from: Jean-Victor Poncelet, Traité des propriétés projectives des figures (1822, rev. 2nd ed.). Trans. by Daniel J. Curtin, Daniel E. Otero and Richard J. Pulskamp, 2025.

and you are encouraged to also read the selections identified from this secondary source, a newly published history of projective geometry (the entire work is available by direct download from Springer and through Ohiolink):

• Selections from: Andrea del Centina and Alessandro Gimigliano, From Here to Infinity: tracing the origin and development of projective geometry. Springer, 2025.