Selling real estate in hyperbolic space would be a great thing to do. In the mathematical movie "Selling Real Estate in Hyperbolic Space", we see why. Our hero Mel Slugbait has some convincing arguments for why we should buy land in the lucrative market of hyperbolic space. Why? Well, in hyperbolic geometry, Euclid's fifth postulate gets thrown right out the window. The fifth postulate of Euclidean geometry says that given any line and any point not on that line, there is exactly one line through that point that is parallel to the original line. But in hyperbolic geometry, there can be an infinite number of "lines" that satisfy the condition. (You may have trouble visualizing this until you realize that "lines" in the hyperbolic geometry sense may look like arcs of circles in the Euclidean sense.) Another neat fact about hyperbolic geometry, is that the sum of angles in a triangle add up to less than 180 degrees.

And this is part of what makes real estate in hyperbolic space so attractive. In the geodesic model of hyperbolic geometry, which is used by M. C. Escher in some of his works, the plane is a circle and the lines are arcs that intersect this circle at 90 degree angles. Because the sum of angles of polygons (remember, you can break any polygon into triangles) is always less than what it would be in Euclidean geometry, you can have pentagons, hexagons, and even 17-gons with all right angled sides. And Mel argues that this is just what people want. Wouldn't you want a room with seven or eight right-angled corners? No more worries about where to put that beautiful corner desk or that rectangular prism of a dresser. Another advantage to land in hyperbolic space (aside from it being cheap, which it is, because very few people realize it is for sale) is that there is just so much of it, because the metric used to measure distance is different from the one used in Euclidean geometry.

The movie was humerous and enjoyable. Mel Slugbait had some convincing arguments, but he just reminded me a bit too much of a used-car salesman. He isn't very rigorous, and everything he says should be taken with a grain of salt.

If you find hyperbolic geometry to be intriguing, you might also wish to consider spherical geometry, which better describes the Earth we live on. In spherical geometry, it is possible to have a line and a point such that no parallel (non-intersecting) lines can be drawn through the point. Also, the sum of the degrees in a triangle is greater than 180 degrees.