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A drawing of a butterfly with bilateral symmetry, with left and right sides as mirror images of each other.. In geometry, an object has symmetry if there is an operation or transformation (such as translation, scaling, rotation or reflection) that maps the figure/object onto itself (i.e., the object has an invariance under the transform). [1]
the azimuthal angle φ, which is the angle of rotation of the radial line around the polar axis. [b] (See graphic regarding the "physics convention".) Once the radius is fixed, the three coordinates (r, θ, φ), known as a 3-tuple, provide a coordinate system on a sphere, typically called the spherical polar coordinates.
Axial symmetry is symmetry around an axis; an object is axially symmetric if its appearance is unchanged if rotated around an axis. [1] For example, a baseball bat without trademark or other design, or a plain white tea saucer , looks the same if it is rotated by any angle about the line passing lengthwise through its center, so it is axially ...
These projections also have radial symmetry in the scales and hence in the distortions: map distances from the central point are computed by a function r(d) of the true distance d, independent of the angle; correspondingly, circles with the central point as center are mapped into circles which have as center the central point on the map.
This can occur in many ways; for example, if X is a set with no additional structure, a symmetry is a bijective map from the set to itself, giving rise to permutation groups. If the object X is a set of points in the plane with its metric structure or any other metric space , a symmetry is a bijection of the set to itself which preserves the ...
A "1-fold" symmetry is no symmetry (all objects look alike after a rotation of 360°). The notation for n-fold symmetry is C n or simply n. The actual symmetry group is specified by the point or axis of symmetry, together with the n. For each point or axis of symmetry, the abstract group type is cyclic group of order n, Z n.
In geometry, circular symmetry is a type of continuous symmetry for a planar object that can be rotated by any arbitrary angle and map onto itself. Rotational circular symmetry is isomorphic with the circle group in the complex plane , or the special orthogonal group SO(2), and unitary group U(1).
The elements of this symmetry group should not be confused with the "symmetry element" itself. Loosely, a symmetry element is the geometric set of fixed points of a symmetry operation. For example, for rotation about an axis, the points on the axis do not move and in a reflection the points that remain unchanged make up a plane of symmetry.