Poincare half plane
It is a model for the axiomatic hyperbolic geometry.
It consists of the upper half complex plane
together with the metric
or, in other words,
A subgroup of the Moebius transformations of the Riemann sphere acts on
There is a conformal map from the pseudosphere to
What about their geodesics? Since this is a conformal map (in the usual sense of the word "map") the metric can be seen like this
See @needham2021visual page 55-57 for details. Every little circle in the map represent a unit of length in the pseudosphere. The conformal requirement is for the circles not to be ellipses. With this picture in mind, geodesics will be lines which go through the fewest amount of circles.
It is related to Snell law for the relation between the angles of light going through two different materials.
Infinite parallels
See @needham2021visual page 61:
Map to the Poincare disk
Define the complex coordinate
One can check that the Ricci scalar curvature is again constant and equal to
Tridimensional version
See @needham2021visual page 80.