Locally Desarguesian spaces

In Riemannian spaces, locally Desarguesian spaces have constant curvature and are therefore locally symmetric. This does not hold for Finsler spaces, so that locally Desarguesian spaces represent a generalization other than the obvious one we studied previously of (certain) Riemannian symmetric spaces. In this paper we discuss them in detail; as an example of the results obtained we mention that a simply connected locally Desarguesian space without conjugate points is globally Desarguesian. Applications are then given to spaces which are locally symmetric in a wider sense. We also study (and in Minkowski spaces determine exactly) the properties of functions which measure the distance of a point from those on a line.