Gino Fano (5 January 1871 – 8 November 1952) was an Italian mathematician, best known as the founder of finite geometry.
Fano was an early writer in the area of finite projective spaces.
In his article[3] on proving the independence of his set of axioms for projective n-space,[4] among other things, he considered the consequences of having a fourth harmonic point be equal to its conjugate.
[3]: 114 All the planes in this space consist of seven points and seven lines and are now known as Fano planes: Fano went on to describe finite projective spaces of arbitrary dimension and prime orders.
In 1907 Gino Fano contributed two articles to Part III of Klein's encyclopedia.