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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 Euclidean plane with a chosen Cartesian coordinate system is called a Cartesian plane. In a Cartesian plane, one can define canonical representatives of certain geometric figures, such as the unit circle (with radius equal to the length unit, and center at the origin), the unit square (whose diagonal has endpoints at (0, 0) and (1, 1)), the ...
A two-dimensional space is a mathematical space with two dimensions, meaning points have two degrees of freedom: their locations can be locally described with two coordinates or they can move in two independent directions. Common two-dimensional spaces are often called planes, or, more generally, surfaces. These include analogs to physical ...
An equivalent definition of a vector space can be given, which is much more concise but less elementary: the first four axioms (related to vector addition) say that a vector space is an abelian group under addition, and the four remaining axioms (related to the scalar multiplication) say that this operation defines a ring homomorphism from the ...
Origins from Alice's and Bob's perspectives. Vector computation from Alice's perspective is in red, whereas that from Bob's is in blue. The following characterization may be easier to understand than the usual formal definition: an affine space is what is left of a vector space after one has forgotten which point is the origin (or, in the words of the French mathematician Marcel Berger, "An ...
Cartesian space was Euclidean in structure—infinite, uniform and flat. [9] It was defined as that which contained matter; conversely, matter by definition had a spatial extension so that there was no such thing as empty space. [6] The Cartesian notion of space is closely linked to his theories about the nature of the body, mind and matter.
In analytic geometry, the intersection of a line and a plane in three-dimensional space can be the empty set, a point, or a line. It is the entire line if that line is embedded in the plane, and is the empty set if the line is parallel to the plane but outside it. Otherwise, the line cuts through the plane at a single point.
Euclidean space was introduced by ancient Greeks as an abstraction of our physical space. Their great innovation, appearing in Euclid's Elements was to build and prove all geometry by starting from a few very basic properties, which are abstracted from the physical world, and cannot be mathematically proved because of the lack of more basic tools.