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In mathematics, a plane is a two-dimensional space or flat surface that extends indefinitely. A plane is the two-dimensional analogue of a point (zero dimensions), a line (one dimension) and three-dimensional space. When working exclusively in two-dimensional Euclidean space, the definite article is used, so the Euclidean plane refers to the ...
A plane segment or planar region (or simply "plane", in lay use) is a planar surface region; it is analogous to a line segment. A bivector is an oriented plane segment, analogous to directed line segments. [a] A face is a plane segment bounding a solid object. [1] A slab is a region bounded by two parallel planes.
In mathematics and physics, the centroid, also known as geometric center or center of figure, of a plane figure or solid figure is the arithmetic mean position of all the points in the surface of the figure. [further explanation needed] The same definition extends to any object in -dimensional Euclidean space. [1]
Euclid defines a plane angle as the inclination to each other, in a plane, of two lines which meet each other, and do not lie straight with respect to each other. [43] In modern terms, an angle is the figure formed by two rays, called the sides of the angle, sharing a common endpoint, called the vertex of the angle. [57]
In graph theory, a planar graph is a graph that can be embedded in the plane, i.e., it can be drawn on the plane in such a way that its edges intersect only at their endpoints. In other words, it can be drawn in such a way that no edges cross each other. [9] Such a drawing is called a plane graph or planar embedding of the graph.
For shapes with curved boundary, calculus is usually required to compute the area. Indeed, the problem of determining the area of plane figures was a major motivation for the historical development of calculus. [5] For a solid shape such as a sphere, cone, or cylinder, the area of its boundary surface is called the surface area.
Geometrically, one studies the Euclidean plane (two dimensions) and Euclidean space. As taught in school books, analytic geometry can be explained more simply: it is concerned with defining and representing geometric shapes in a numerical way and extracting numerical information from shapes' numerical definitions and representations.
Two-dimensional spaces can also be curved, for example the sphere and hyperbolic plane, sufficiently small portions of which appear like the flat plane, but on which straight lines which are locally parallel do not stay equidistant from each-other but eventually converge or diverge, respectively.