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The wavefronts of a plane wave traveling in 3-space. A plane serves as a mathematical model for many physical phenomena, such as specular reflection in a plane mirror or wavefronts in a traveling plane wave. The free surface of undisturbed liquids tends to be nearly flat (see flatness).
Rotation formalisms are focused on proper (orientation-preserving) motions of the Euclidean space with one fixed point, that a rotation refers to.Although physical motions with a fixed point are an important case (such as ones described in the center-of-mass frame, or motions of a joint), this approach creates a knowledge about all motions.
In geometry, a motion is an isometry of a metric space. For instance, a plane equipped with the Euclidean distance metric is a metric space in which a mapping associating congruent figures is a motion. [1] More generally, the term motion is a synonym for surjective isometry in metric geometry, [2] including elliptic geometry and hyperbolic ...
Two distinct planes can either meet in a common line or are parallel (i.e., do not meet). Three distinct planes, no pair of which are parallel, can either meet in a common line, meet in a unique common point, or have no point in common. In the last case, the three lines of intersection of each pair of planes are mutually parallel.
A plane rotation around a point followed by another rotation around a different point results in a total motion which is either a rotation (as in this picture), or a translation. A motion of a Euclidean space is the same as its isometry : it leaves the distance between any two points unchanged after the transformation.
The plane of rotation is orthogonal to this plane, and the rotation can be said to take place in this plane. For example the following matrix fixes the xy-plane: points in that plane and only in that plane are unchanged. The plane of rotation is the zw-plane, points in this plane are rotated through an angle θ.
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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.