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Direct projection of 3-sphere into 3D space and covered with surface grid, showing structure as stack of 3D spheres (2-spheres) In mathematics, a hypersphere or 3-sphere is a 4-dimensional analogue of a sphere, and is the 3-dimensional n-sphere. In 4-dimensional Euclidean space, it is the set of points equidistant from a fixed central point.
In the extrinsic 3-dimensional picture, a great circle is the intersection of the sphere with any plane through the center. In the intrinsic approach, a great circle is a geodesic; a shortest path between any two of its points provided they are close enough. Or, in the (also intrinsic) axiomatic approach analogous to Euclid's axioms of plane ...
Tessellations of euclidean and hyperbolic space may also be considered regular polytopes. Note that an 'n'-dimensional polytope actually tessellates a space of one dimension less. For example, the (three-dimensional) platonic solids tessellate the 'two'-dimensional 'surface' of the sphere.
The ordinary sphere is a 2-sphere, because it is a 2-dimensional surface which is embedded in 3-dimensional space. In topology, the n-sphere is an example of a compact topological manifold without boundary. A topological sphere need not be smooth; if it is smooth, it need not be diffeomorphic to the Euclidean sphere (an exotic sphere).
For example, one sphere that is described in Cartesian coordinates with the equation x 2 + y 2 + z 2 = c 2 can be described in spherical coordinates by the simple equation r = c. (In this system—shown here in the mathematics convention—the sphere is adapted as a unit sphere, where the radius is set to unity and then can generally be ignored ...
Another type of sphere arises from a 4-ball, whose three-dimensional surface is the 3-sphere: points equidistant to the origin of the euclidean space R 4. If a point has coordinates, P ( x , y , z , w ) , then x 2 + y 2 + z 2 + w 2 = 1 characterizes those points on the unit 3-sphere centered at the origin.
A globe is a spherical model of Earth, of some other celestial body, or of the celestial sphere. Globes serve purposes similar to maps, but, unlike maps, they do not distort the surface that they portray except to scale it down. A model globe of Earth is called a terrestrial globe. A model globe of the celestial sphere is called a celestial globe.
Similarly, within a three-dimensional space, a right hand and a left hand have a different shape, even if they are the mirror images of each other. Shapes may change if the object is scaled non-uniformly. For example, a sphere becomes an ellipsoid when scaled differently in the vertical