Elliptic geometry geometry is that the sum of the interior angles of a triangle is greater than 180 degrees. In the spherical model, for example, a triangle can be constructed with vertices at the locations where the three positive Cartesian coordinate axes intersect the sphere, and all three of its internal angles are 90 degrees, summing to 270 degrees. For sufficiently small triangles, the excess over 180 degrees can be made arbitrarily small. The Pythagorean theorem fails in elliptic geometry. In the 90°–90°–90° triangle described above, all three sides have the same length, and consequently do not satisfy formula_1. The Pythagorean result
Triangle group of these relations and that Δ("l,m,n") is a discrete group of motions of the corresponding space. Thus a triangle group is a reflection group that admits a group presentation An abstract group with this presentation is a Coxeter group with three generators. Given any natural numbers "l", "m", "n" > 1 exactly one of the classical two-dimensional geometries (Euclidean, spherical, or hyperbolic) admits a triangle with the angles (π/l, π/m, π/n), and the space is tiled by reflections of the triangle. The sum of the angles of the triangle determines the type of the geometry by the Gauss–Bonnet theorem: it