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A plumb bob, plumb bob level, or plummet, is a weight, usually with a pointed tip on the bottom, suspended from a string and used as a vertical direction as a reference line, or plumb-line. It is a precursor to the spirit level and used to establish a vertical datum. It is typically made of stone, wood, or lead, but can also be made of other ...
In geometry, a straight line, usually abbreviated line, is an infinitely long object with no width, depth, or curvature, an idealization of such physical objects as a straightedge, a taut string, or a ray of light. Lines are spaces of dimension one, which may be embedded in spaces of dimension two, three, or higher.
A simplicial line arrangement (left) and a simple line arrangement (right). In geometry, an arrangement of lines is the subdivision of the Euclidean plane formed by a finite set of lines. An arrangement consists of bounded and unbounded convex polygons , the cells of the arrangement, line segments and rays , the edges of the arrangement, and ...
With these modern definitions, every geometric shape is defined as a set of points; this is not the case in synthetic geometry, where a line is another fundamental object that is not viewed as the set of the points through which it passes. However, there are modern geometries in which points are not primitive objects, or even without points.
A straightedge or straight edge is a tool used for drawing straight lines, or checking their straightness. If it has equally spaced markings along its length, it is usually called a ruler . Straightedges are used in the automotive service and machining industry to check the flatness of machined mating surfaces.
The term also has meaning in any differentiable manifold with a connection. It is a generalization of the notion of a "straight line". The noun geodesic and the adjective geodetic come from geodesy, the science of measuring the size and shape of Earth, though many of the underlying principles can be applied to any ellipsoidal geometry.
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A straight-line embedding of , of the type described by Tutte's theorem, may be formed by projecting such a polyhedral representation onto the plane. The Circle packing theorem states that every planar graph may be represented as the intersection graph of a collection of non-crossing circles in the plane.