In mathematics, a near polygon is an incidence geometry introduced by Ernest E. Shult and Arthur Yanushka in 1980. Shult and Yanushka showed the connection between the so-called tetrahedrally closed line-systems in Euclidean spaces and a class of point-line geometries which they called near polygons. These structures generalise the notion of generalized polygon as every generalized 2n-gon is a near 2n-gon of a particular kind. Near polygons were extensively studied and connection between them and dual polar spaces was shown in 1980s and early 1990s. Some sporadic simple groups, for example the Hall-Janko group and the Mathieu groups, act as automorphism groups of near polygons.