a tiling, every finite patch of kites and darts appears infinitely often. As a consequence, there is no way to distinguish two Penrose tilings by looking at a finite portion. This makes it impossible to assign the set of all tilings a topology in the traditional sense. Despite this, the Penrose tilings determine a non-commutative and consequently they can be studied by the techniques of non-commutative geometry. Another example, and one of great interest within differential geometry, comes from foliations of manifolds. These are ways of splitting the manifold up into smaller-dimensional submanifolds called leaves, each of which is locally parallel to others nearby. The set of all leaves can be made into a topological space. However, the example of an irrational rotation shows that this topological space can be inaccessible to the techniques of classical measure theory. However, there is a non-commutative von Neumann algebra associated to the leaf space of a foliation, and once again, this gives an otherwise unintelligible space a good geometric structure. Schemes Algebraic geometry studies the geometric properties of polynomial equations. Polynomials are a type of function defined from the basic arithmetic operations of addition and multiplication. Because of this, they are closely tied to algebra. Algebraic geometry offers a way to apply geometric techniques to questions of pure algebra, and vice versa. Prior to the 1940s, algebraic geometry worked exclusively over the complex numbers, and the most fundamental variety was projective space. The geometry of projective space is closely related to the theory of perspective, and its algebra is described by homogeneous polynomials. All other varieties were defined as subsets of projective space. Projective varieties were subsets defined by a set of homogeneous polynomials. At each point of the projective variety, all the polynomials in the set were required to equal zero. The complement of the zero set of a linear polynomial is an affine space, and an affine variety was the intersection of a projective variety with an affine space. André Weil saw that geometric reasoning could sometimes be applied in number-theoretic situations where the spaces in question might be discrete or even finite. In pursuit of this idea, Weil rewrote the foundations of algebraic geometry, both freeing algebraic geometry from its reliance on complex numbers and introducing abstract algebraic varieties which were not embedded in projective space. These are now simply called varieties. The type of space that underlies most modern