Tangent segments and orthogonality types in normed planes

摘要

The following characterizations of the Euclidean plane are obtained: the two tangent segments of the unit circle of a normed plane from each point of a disc centered at the origin with sufficiently large diameter have equal lengths; the lengths of the tangent segments from each point of a fixed circle centered at the origin are determined only by the radius of this circle. Three further characterizations of the Euclidean plane are obtained by considering properties of certain points related to an exterior point of the unit disc and the two tangent segments corresponding to it. To obtain one of these characterizations, the notion of arc-length orthogonality is introduced, and the Euclidean plane is also characterized via a relation between arc-length orthogonality and Birkhoff orthogonality.