 The origins of this geometric theory lay in the 17th century, with Desargues and Pascal, but plane projective geometry took a particular boost from Jean Victor Poncelet’s book of 1822 Traité des propriétés projectives des figures where he showed the power of projective methods under the provocative formulation of non-metrical geometry. The fundamental character of the new geometry resides in the way it can be thought of as capturing the simplest properties of the straight line—two distinct points define a unique line, two distinct lines meet in at most one point—while discarding the metrical concepts of distance and angle.