In mathematics and physics, a vector space is a set whose elements, often called vectors, may be added together and multiplied ("scaled") by numbers called scalars. Scalars are often real numbers, but can be complex numbers or, more generally, elements of any field. The operations of vector addition and scalar multiplication must satisfy certain requirements, called vector axioms. Real vector space and complex vector space are kinds of vector spaces based on different kinds of scalars: real coordinate space or complex coordinate space.
In mathematics, the quaternion number system extends the complex numbers. Quaternions were first described by the Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton in 1843 and applied to mechanics in three-dimensional space. The algebra of quaternions is often denoted by H, or in blackboard bold by Although multiplication of quaternions is noncommutative, it gives a definition of the quotient of two vectors in a three-dimensional space. Quaternions are generally represented in the form
In vector calculus and physics, a vector field is an assignment of a vector to each point in a space, most commonly Euclidean space . A vector field on a plane can be visualized as a collection of arrows with given magnitudes and directions, each attached to a point on the plane. Vector fields are often used to model, for example, the speed and direction of a moving fluid throughout three dimensional space, such as the wind, or the strength and direction of some force, such as the magnetic or gravitational force, as it changes from one point to another point.
In mathematics, an algebra over a field is a vector space equipped with a bilinear product. Thus, an algebra is an algebraic structure consisting of a set together with operations of multiplication and addition and scalar multiplication by elements of a field and satisfying the axioms implied by "vector space" and "bilinear".
In mathematics, the concept of a projective space originated from the visual effect of perspective, where parallel lines seem to meet at infinity. A projective space may thus be viewed as the extension of a Euclidean space, or, more generally, an affine space with points at infinity, in such a way that there is one point at infinity of each direction of parallel lines.
In mathematics, K-theory is, roughly speaking, the study of a ring generated by vector bundles over a topological space or scheme. In algebraic topology, it is a cohomology theory known as topological K-theory. In algebra and algebraic geometry, it is referred to as algebraic K-theory. It is also a fundamental tool in the field of operator algebras. It can be seen as the study of certain kinds of invariants of large matrices.
Algebraic varieties are the central objects of study in algebraic geometry, a sub-field of mathematics. Classically, an algebraic variety is defined as the set of solutions of a system of polynomial equations over the real or complex numbers. Modern definitions generalize this concept in several different ways, while attempting to preserve the geometric intuition behind the original definition.
In algebraic geometry, a projective variety over an algebraically closed field k is a subset of some projective n-space over k that is the zero-locus of some finite family of homogeneous polynomials of n + 1 variables with coefficients in k, that generate a prime ideal, the defining ideal of the variety. Equivalently, an algebraic variety is projective if it can be embedded as a Zariski closed subvariety of .
In mathematics, a scheme is a mathematical structure that enlarges the notion of algebraic variety in several ways, such as taking account of multiplicities and allowing "varieties" defined over any commutative ring.
In mathematics, the conformal group of an inner product space is the group of transformations from the space to itself that preserve angles. More formally, it is the group of transformations that preserve the conformal geometry of the space.
In geometry and group theory, a lattice in the real coordinate space is an infinite set of points in this space with the properties that coordinate-wise addition or subtraction of two points in the lattice produces another lattice point, that the lattice points are all separated by some minimum distance, and that every point in the space is within some maximum distance of a lattice point. Closure under addition and subtraction means that a lattice must be a subgroup of the additive group of the points in the space, and the requirements of minimum and maximum distance can be summarized by saying that a lattice is a Delone set. More abstractly, a lattice can be described as a free abelian group of dimension which spans the vector space . For any basis of , the subgroup of all linear combinations with integer coefficients of the basis vectors forms a lattice, and every lattice can be formed from a basis in this way. A lattice may be viewed as a regular tiling of a space by a primitive cell.
In projective geometry, duality or plane duality is a formalization of the striking symmetry of the roles played by points and lines in the definitions and theorems of projective planes. There are two approaches to the subject of duality, one through language and the other a more functional approach through special mappings. These are completely equivalent and either treatment has as its starting point the axiomatic version of the geometries under consideration. In the functional approach there is a map between related geometries that is called a duality. Such a map can be constructed in many ways. The concept of plane duality readily extends to space duality and beyond that to duality in any finite-dimensional projective geometry.
In mathematics, complex projective space is the projective space with respect to the field of complex numbers. By analogy, whereas the points of a real projective space label the lines through the origin of a real Euclidean space, the points of a complex projective space label the complex lines through the origin of a complex Euclidean space (see below for an intuitive account). Formally, a complex projective space is the space of complex lines through the origin of an (n+1)-dimensional complex vector space. The space is denoted variously as P(Cn+1), Pn(C) or CPn. When n = 1, the complex projective space CP1 is the Riemann sphere, and when n = 2, CP2 is the complex projective plane (see there for a more elementary discussion).
In abstract algebra, a representation of an associative algebra is a module for that algebra. Here an associative algebra is a ring. If the algebra is not unital, it may be made so in a standard way ; there is no essential difference between modules for the resulting unital ring, in which the identity acts by the identity mapping, and representations of the algebra.
In mathematics, the real coordinate space or real coordinate n-space, of dimension n, denoted Rn or , is the set of the n-tuples of real numbers, that is the set of all sequences of n real numbers. Special cases are called the real lineR1, the real coordinate planeR2, and the real coordinate three-dimensional spaceR3. With component-wise addition and scalar multiplication, it is a real vector space, and its elements are called coordinate vectors.
In geometry, a three-dimensional space is a mathematical space in which three values (coordinates) are required to determine the position of a point. Most commonly, it is the three-dimensional Euclidean space, that is, the Euclidean space of dimension three, which models physical space. More general three-dimensional spaces are called 3-manifolds. The term may also refer colloquially to a subset of space, a three-dimensional region, a solid figure.
In algebraic geometry, the Chow groups of an algebraic variety over any field are algebro-geometric analogs of the homology of a topological space. The elements of the Chow group are formed out of subvarieties in a similar way to how simplicial or cellular homology groups are formed out of subcomplexes. When the variety is smooth, the Chow groups can be interpreted as cohomology groups and have a multiplication called the intersection product. The Chow groups carry rich information about an algebraic variety, and they are correspondingly hard to compute in general.
Affine geometry, broadly speaking, is the study of the geometrical properties of lines, planes, and their higher dimensional analogs, in which a notion of "parallel" is retained, but no metrical notions of distance or angle are. Affine spaces differ from linear spaces in that they do not have a distinguished choice of origin. So, in the words of Marcel Berger, "An affine space is nothing more than a vector space whose origin we try to forget about, by adding translations to the linear maps." Accordingly, a complex affine space, that is an affine space over the complex numbers, is like a complex vector space, but without a distinguished point to serve as the origin.
In mathematics, a Euclidean plane is a Euclidean space of dimension two, denoted E2. It is a geometric space in which two real numbers are required to determine the position of each point. It is an affine space, which includes in particular the concept of parallel lines. It has also metrical properties induced by a distance, which allows to define circles, and angle measurement.
This is a glossary of algebraic geometry.
