# Parallel (geometry)

Last updated

In geometry, parallel lines are lines in a plane which do not meet; that is, two lines in a plane that do not intersect or touch each other at any point are said to be parallel. By extension, a line and a plane, or two planes, in three-dimensional Euclidean space that do not share a point are said to be parallel. However, two lines in three-dimensional space which do not meet must be in a common plane to be considered parallel; otherwise they are called skew lines. Parallel planes are planes in the same three-dimensional space that never meet.

Geometry is a branch of mathematics concerned with questions of shape, size, relative position of figures, and the properties of space. A mathematician who works in the field of geometry is called a geometer.

The notion of line or straight line was introduced by ancient mathematicians to represent straight objects with negligible width and depth. Lines are an idealization of such objects. Until the 17th century, lines were defined as the "[…] first species of quantity, which has only one dimension, namely length, without any width nor depth, and is nothing else than the flow or run of the point which […] will leave from its imaginary moving some vestige in length, exempt of any width. […] The straight line is that which is equally extended between its points."

In mathematics, a plane is a flat, two-dimensional surface that extends infinitely far. A plane is the two-dimensional analogue of a point, a line and three-dimensional space. Planes can arise as subspaces of some higher-dimensional space, as with a room's walls extended infinitely far, or they may enjoy an independent existence in their own right, as in the setting of Euclidean geometry.

## Contents

Parallel lines are the subject of Euclid's parallel postulate. [1] Parallelism is primarily a property of affine geometries and Euclidean geometry is a special instance of this type of geometry. In some other geometries, such as hyperbolic geometry, lines can have analogous properties that are referred to as parallelism.

Euclid, sometimes called Euclid of Alexandria to distinguish him from Euclid of Megara, was a Greek mathematician, often referred to as the "founder of geometry" or the "father of geometry". He was active in Alexandria during the reign of Ptolemy I. His Elements is one of the most influential works in the history of mathematics, serving as the main textbook for teaching mathematics from the time of its publication until the late 19th or early 20th century. In the Elements, Euclid deduced the theorems of what is now called Euclidean geometry from a small set of axioms. Euclid also wrote works on perspective, conic sections, spherical geometry, number theory, and mathematical rigour.

In geometry, the parallel postulate, also called Euclid's fifth postulate because it is the fifth postulate in Euclid's Elements, is a distinctive axiom in Euclidean geometry. It states that, in two-dimensional geometry:

If a line segment intersects two straight lines forming two interior angles on the same side that sum to less than two right angles, then the two lines, if extended indefinitely, meet on that side on which the angles sum to less than two right angles.

In mathematics, affine geometry is what remains of Euclidean geometry when not using the metric notions of distance and angle.

## Symbol

The parallel symbol is ${\displaystyle \parallel }$. [2] [3] For example, ${\displaystyle AB\parallel CD}$ indicates that line AB is parallel to line CD.

In the Unicode character set, the "parallel" and "not parallel" signs have codepoints U+2225 (∥) and U+2226 (∦), respectively. In addition, U+22D5 (⋕) represents the relation "equal and parallel to". [4]

Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard is maintained by the Unicode Consortium, and as of May 2019 the most recent version, Unicode 12.1, contains a repertoire of 137,994 characters covering 150 modern and historic scripts, as well as multiple symbol sets and emoji. The character repertoire of the Unicode Standard is synchronized with ISO/IEC 10646, and both are code-for-code identical.

## Euclidean parallelism

### Two lines in a plane

#### Conditions for parallelism

Given parallel straight lines l and m in Euclidean space, the following properties are equivalent:

In geometry, Euclidean space encompasses the two-dimensional Euclidean plane, the three-dimensional space of Euclidean geometry, and similar spaces of higher dimension. It is named after the Ancient Greek mathematician Euclid of Alexandria. The term "Euclidean" distinguishes these spaces from other types of spaces considered in modern geometry. Euclidean spaces also generalize to higher dimensions.

1. Every point on line m is located at exactly the same (minimum) distance from line l ( equidistant lines).
2. Line m is in the same plane as line l but does not intersect l (recall that lines extend to infinity in either direction).
3. When lines m and l are both intersected by a third straight line (a transversal) in the same plane, the corresponding angles of intersection with the transversal are congruent.

Since these are equivalent properties, any one of them could be taken as the definition of parallel lines in Euclidean space, but the first and third properties involve measurement, and so, are "more complicated" than the second. Thus, the second property is the one usually chosen as the defining property of parallel lines in Euclidean geometry. [5] The other properties are then consequences of Euclid's Parallel Postulate. Another property that also involves measurement is that lines parallel to each other have the same gradient (slope).

In vector calculus, the gradient is a multi-variable generalization of the derivative. Whereas the ordinary derivative of a function of a single variable is a scalar-valued function, the gradient of a function of several variables is a vector-valued function. Specifically, the gradient of a differentiable function of several variables, at a point , is the vector whose components are the partial derivatives of at .

#### History

The definition of parallel lines as a pair of straight lines in a plane which do not meet appears as Definition 23 in Book I of Euclid's Elements. [6] Alternative definitions were discussed by other Greeks, often as part of an attempt to prove the parallel postulate. Proclus attributes a definition of parallel lines as equidistant lines to Posidonius and quotes Geminus in a similar vein. Simplicius also mentions Posidonius' definition as well as its modification by the philosopher Aganis. [6]

At the end of the nineteenth century, in England, Euclid's Elements was still the standard textbook in secondary schools. The traditional treatment of geometry was being pressured to change by the new developments in projective geometry and non-Euclidean geometry, so several new textbooks for the teaching of geometry were written at this time. A major difference between these reform texts, both between themselves and between them and Euclid, is the treatment of parallel lines. [7] These reform texts were not without their critics and one of them, Charles Dodgson (a.k.a. Lewis Carroll), wrote a play, Euclid and His Modern Rivals, in which these texts are lambasted. [8]

One of the early reform textbooks was James Maurice Wilson's Elementary Geometry of 1868. [9] Wilson based his definition of parallel lines on the primitive notion of direction. According to Wilhelm Killing [10] the idea may be traced back to Leibniz. [11] Wilson, without defining direction since it is a primitive, uses the term in other definitions such as his sixth definition, "Two straight lines that meet one another have different directions, and the difference of their directions is the angle between them." Wilson (1868 , p. 2) In definition 15 he introduces parallel lines in this way; "Straight lines which have the same direction, but are not parts of the same straight line, are called parallel lines." Wilson (1868 , p. 12) Augustus De Morgan reviewed this text and declared it a failure, primarily on the basis of this definition and the way Wilson used it to prove things about parallel lines. Dodgson also devotes a large section of his play (Act II, Scene VI § 1) to denouncing Wilson's treatment of parallels. Wilson edited this concept out of the third and higher editions of his text. [12]

Other properties, proposed by other reformers, used as replacements for the definition of parallel lines, did not fare much better. The main difficulty, as pointed out by Dodgson, was that to use them in this way required additional axioms to be added to the system. The equidistant line definition of Posidonius, expounded by Francis Cuthbertson in his 1874 text Euclidean Geometry suffers from the problem that the points that are found at a fixed given distance on one side of a straight line must be shown to form a straight line. This can not be proved and must be assumed to be true. [13] The corresponding angles formed by a transversal property, used by W. D. Cooley in his 1860 text, The Elements of Geometry, simplified and explained requires a proof of the fact that if one transversal meets a pair of lines in congruent corresponding angles then all transversals must do so. Again, a new axiom is needed to justify this statement.

#### Construction

The three properties above lead to three different methods of construction [14] of parallel lines.

#### Distance between two parallel lines

Because parallel lines in a Euclidean plane are equidistant there is a unique distance between the two parallel lines. Given the equations of two non-vertical, non-horizontal parallel lines,

${\displaystyle y=mx+b_{1}\,}$
${\displaystyle y=mx+b_{2}\,,}$

the distance between the two lines can be found by locating two points (one on each line) that lie on a common perpendicular to the parallel lines and calculating the distance between them. Since the lines have slope m, a common perpendicular would have slope −1/m and we can take the line with equation y = −x/m as a common perpendicular. Solve the linear systems

${\displaystyle {\begin{cases}y=mx+b_{1}\\y=-x/m\end{cases}}}$

and

${\displaystyle {\begin{cases}y=mx+b_{2}\\y=-x/m\end{cases}}}$

to get the coordinates of the points. The solutions to the linear systems are the points

${\displaystyle \left(x_{1},y_{1}\right)\ =\left({\frac {-b_{1}m}{m^{2}+1}},{\frac {b_{1}}{m^{2}+1}}\right)\,}$

and

${\displaystyle \left(x_{2},y_{2}\right)\ =\left({\frac {-b_{2}m}{m^{2}+1}},{\frac {b_{2}}{m^{2}+1}}\right).}$

These formulas still give the correct point coordinates even if the parallel lines are horizontal (i.e., m = 0). The distance between the points is

${\displaystyle d={\sqrt {\left({\frac {b_{1}m-b_{2}m}{m^{2}+1}}\right)^{2}+\left({\frac {b_{2}-b_{1}}{m^{2}+1}}\right)^{2}}}\,,}$

which reduces to

${\displaystyle d={\frac {|b_{2}-b_{1}|}{\sqrt {m^{2}+1}}}\,.}$

When the lines are given by the general form of the equation of a line (horizontal and vertical lines are included):

${\displaystyle ax+by+c_{1}=0\,}$
${\displaystyle ax+by+c_{2}=0,\,}$

their distance can be expressed as

${\displaystyle d={\frac {|c_{2}-c_{1}|}{\sqrt {a^{2}+b^{2}}}}.}$

### Two lines in three-dimensional space

Two lines in the same three-dimensional space that do not intersect need not be parallel. Only if they are in a common plane are they called parallel; otherwise they are called skew lines.

Two distinct lines l and m in three-dimensional space are parallel if and only if the distance from a point P on line m to the nearest point on line l is independent of the location of P on line m. This never holds for skew lines.

### A line and a plane

A line m and a plane q in three-dimensional space, the line not lying in that plane, are parallel if and only if they do not intersect.

Equivalently, they are parallel if and only if the distance from a point P on line m to the nearest point in plane q is independent of the location of P on line m.

### Two planes

Similar to the fact that parallel lines must be located in the same plane, parallel planes must be situated in the same three-dimensional space and contain no point in common.

Two distinct planes q and r are parallel if and only if the distance from a point P in plane q to the nearest point in plane r is independent of the location of P in plane q. This will never hold if the two planes are not in the same three-dimensional space.

## Extension to non-Euclidean geometry

In non-Euclidean geometry, it is more common to talk about geodesics than (straight) lines. A geodesic is the shortest path between two points in a given geometry. In physics this may be interpreted as the path that a particle follows if no force is applied to it. In non-Euclidean geometry (elliptic or hyperbolic geometry) the three Euclidean properties mentioned above are not equivalent and only the second one,(Line m is in the same plane as line l but does not intersect l ) since it involves no measurements is useful in non-Euclidean geometries. In general geometry the three properties above give three different types of curves, equidistant curves, parallel geodesics and geodesics sharing a common perpendicular, respectively.

### Hyperbolic geometry

While in Euclidean geometry two geodesics can either intersect or be parallel, in hyperbolic geometry, there are three possibilities. Two geodesics belonging to the same plane can either be:

1. intersecting, if they intersect in a common point in the plane,
2. parallel, if they do not intersect in the plane, but converge to a common limit point at infinity (ideal point), or
3. ultra parallel, if they do not have a common limit point at infinity.

In the literature ultra parallel geodesics are often called non-intersecting. Geodesics intersecting at infinity are called limiting parallel .

As in the illustration through a point a not on line l there are two limiting parallel lines, one for each direction ideal point of line l. They separate the lines intersecting line l and those that are ultra parallel to line l.

Ultra parallel lines have single common perpendicular (ultraparallel theorem), and diverge on both sides of this common perpendicular.

### Spherical or elliptic geometry

In spherical geometry, all geodesics are great circles. Great circles divide the sphere in two equal hemispheres and all great circles intersect each other. Thus, there are no parallel geodesics to a given geodesic, as all geodesics intersect. Equidistant curves on the sphere are called parallels of latitude analogous to the latitude lines on a globe. Parallels of latitude can be generated by the intersection of the sphere with a plane parallel to a plane through the center of the sphere.

## Reflexive variant

If l, m, n are three distinct lines, then ${\displaystyle l\parallel m\ \land \ m\parallel n\ \implies \ l\parallel n.}$

In this case, parallelism is a transitive relation. However, in case l = n, the superimposed lines are not considered parallel in Euclidean geometry. The binary relation between parallel lines is evidently a symmetric relation. According to Euclid's tenets, parallelism is not a reflexive relation and thus fails to be an equivalence relation. Nevertheless, in affine geometry a pencil of parallel lines is taken as an equivalence class in the set of lines where parallelism is an equivalence relation. [15] [16] [17]

To this end, Emil Artin (1957) adopted a definition of parallelism where two lines are parallel if they have all or none of their points in common. [18] Then a line is parallel to itself so that the reflexive and transitive properties belong to this type of parallelism, creating an equivalence relation on the set of lines. In the study of incidence geometry, this variant of parallelism is used in the affine plane.

## Notes

1. Although this postulate only refers to when lines meet, it is needed to prove the uniqueness of parallel lines in the sense of Playfair's axiom.
2. Kersey (the elder), John (1673). Algebra. Book IV. London. p. 177.
3. Cajori, Florian (1993) [September 1928]. "§ 184, § 359, § 368". A History of Mathematical Notations - Notations in Elementary Mathematics. 1 (two volumes in one unaltered reprint ed.). Chicago, US: Open court publishing company. pp. 193, 402–403, 411–412. ISBN   0-486-67766-4. LCCN   93-29211 . Retrieved 2019-07-22. §359. […] ∥ for parallel occurs in Oughtred's Opuscula mathematica hactenus inedita (1677) [p. 197], a posthumous work (§ 184) […] §368. Signs for parallel lines. […] when Recorde's sign of equality won its way upon the Continent, vertical lines came to be used for parallelism. We find ∥ for "parallel" in Kersey,[14] Caswell, Jones,[15] Wilson,[16] Emerson,[17] Kambly,[18] and the writers of the last fifty years who have been already quoted in connection with other pictographs. Before about 1875 it does not occur as often […] Hall and Stevens[1] use "par[1] or ∥" for parallel […] [14] John Kersey, Algebra (London, 1673), Book IV, p. 177. [15] W. Jones, Synopsis palmarioum matheseos (London, 1706). [16] John Wilson, Trigonometry (Edinburgh, 1714), characters explained. [17] W. Emerson, Elements of Geometry (London, 1763), p. 4. [18] L. Kambly  [ de ], Die Elementar-Mathematik, Part 2: Planimetrie, 43. edition (Breslau, 1876), p. 8. […] [1] H. S. Hall and F. H. Stevens, Euclid's Elements, Parts I and II (London, 1889), p. 10. […]
4. "Mathematical Operators – Unicode Consortium" (PDF). Retrieved 2013-04-21.
5. Wylie, Jr. 1964 , pp. 92—94
6. Heath 1956 , pp. 190–194
7. Richards 1988 , Chap. 4: Euclid and the English Schoolchild. pp. 161–200
8. Carroll, Lewis (2009) [1879], Euclid and His Modern Rivals, Barnes & Noble, ISBN   978-1-4351-2348-9
9. Einführung in die Grundlagen der Geometrie, I, p. 5
10. Heath 1956 , p. 194
11. Richards 1988 , pp. 180–184
12. Heath 1956 , p. 194
13. Only the third is a straightedge and compass construction, the first two are infinitary processes (they require an "infinite number of steps".)
14. H. S. M. Coxeter (1961) Introduction to Geometry, p 192, John Wiley & Sons
15. Wanda Szmielew (1983) From Affine to Euclidean Geometry, p 17, D. Reidel ISBN   90-277-1243-3
16. Andy Liu (2011) "Is parallelism an equivalence relation?", The College Mathematics Journal 42(5):372
17. Emil Artin (1957) Geometric Algebra, page 52

## Related Research Articles

A circle is a simple closed shape. It is the set of all points in a plane that are at a given distance from a given point, the centre; equivalently it is the curve traced out by a point that moves in a plane so that its distance from a given point is constant. The distance between any of the points and the centre is called the radius. This article is about circles in Euclidean geometry, and, in particular, the Euclidean plane, except where otherwise noted.

A sphere is a perfectly round geometrical object in three-dimensional space that is the surface of a completely round ball.

In mathematics, non-Euclidean geometry consists of two geometries based on axioms closely related to those specifying Euclidean geometry. As Euclidean geometry lies at the intersection of metric geometry and affine geometry, non-Euclidean geometry arises when either the metric requirement is relaxed, or the parallel postulate is replaced with an alternative one. In the latter case one obtains hyperbolic geometry and elliptic geometry, the traditional non-Euclidean geometries. When the metric requirement is relaxed, then there are affine planes associated with the planar algebras which give rise to kinematic geometries that have also been called non-Euclidean geometry.

In geometry, bisection is the division of something into two equal or congruent parts, usually by a line, which is then called a bisector. The most often considered types of bisectors are the segment bisector and the angle bisector.

In mathematics, hyperbolic geometry is a non-Euclidean geometry. The parallel postulate of Euclidean geometry is replaced with:

In geometry, a secant of a curve is a line that intersects the curve in at least two (distinct) points. The word secant comes from the Latin word secare, meaning to cut. In the case of a circle, a secant will intersect the circle in exactly two points and a chord is the line segment determined by these two points, that is the interval on a secant whose endpoints are these points.

In mathematics, a hyperbolic space is a homogeneous space that has a constant negative curvature, where in this case the curvature is the sectional curvature. It is hyperbolic geometry in more than 2 dimensions, and is distinguished from Euclidean spaces with zero curvature that define the Euclidean geometry, and elliptic geometry that have a constant positive curvature.

In non-Euclidean geometry, the Poincaré half-plane model is the upper half-plane, denoted below as H , together with a metric, the Poincaré metric, that makes it a model of two-dimensional hyperbolic geometry.

In geometry, a locus is a set of all points, whose location satisfies or is determined by one or more specified conditions.

In hyperbolic geometry, the angle of parallelism , is the angle at one vertex of a right hyperbolic triangle that has two asymptotic parallel sides. The angle depends on the segment length a between the right angle and the vertex of the angle of parallelism.

In mathematics, Hilbert's fourth problem in the 1900 Hilbert problems is a foundational question in geometry. In one statement derived from the original, it was to find up to an isomorphism all geometries whose axioms system of the classical geometry if we drop the axioms of congruence involving the concept of the angle and add the systems with the `triangle inequality' regarded as an axiom.

Three-dimensional space is a geometric setting in which three values are required to determine the position of an element. This is the informal meaning of the term dimension.

In geometry, the Beltrami–Klein model, also called the projective model, Klein disk model, and the Cayley–Klein model, is a model of hyperbolic geometry in which points are represented by the points in the interior of the unit disk and lines are represented by the chords, straight line segments with ideal endpoints on the boundary sphere.

In mathematics, the differential geometry of surfaces deals with the differential geometry of smooth surfaces with various additional structures, most often, a Riemannian metric. Surfaces have been extensively studied from various perspectives: extrinsically, relating to their embedding in Euclidean space and intrinsically, reflecting their properties determined solely by the distance within the surface as measured along curves on the surface. One of the fundamental concepts investigated is the Gaussian curvature, first studied in depth by Carl Friedrich Gauss, who showed that curvature was an intrinsic property of a surface, independent of its isometric embedding in Euclidean space.

In mathematics, a conic section is a curve obtained as the intersection of the surface of a cone with a plane. The three types of conic section are the hyperbola, the parabola, and the ellipse; the circle is a special case of the ellipse, though historically it was sometimes called a fourth type. The ancient Greek mathematicians studied conic sections, culminating around 200 BC with Apollonius of Perga's systematic work on their properties.

In geometry, the Poincaré disk model, also called the conformal disk model, is a model of 2-dimensional hyperbolic geometry in which the points of the geometry are inside the unit disk, and the straight lines consist of all segments of circles contained within that disk that are orthogonal to the boundary of the disk, plus all diameters of the disk.

In geometry, Playfair's axiom is an axiom that can be used instead of the fifth postulate of Euclid :

In a plane, given a line and a point not on it, at most one line parallel to the given line can be drawn through the point.

## References

• Heath, Thomas L. (1956), The Thirteen Books of Euclid's Elements (2nd ed. [Facsimile. Original publication: Cambridge University Press, 1925] ed.), New York: Dover Publications
(3 vols.): ISBN   0-486-60088-2 (vol. 1), ISBN   0-486-60089-0 (vol. 2), ISBN   0-486-60090-4 (vol. 3). Heath's authoritative translation plus extensive historical research and detailed commentary throughout the text.
• Richards, Joan L. (1988), Mathematical Visions: The Pursuit of Geometry in Victorian England, Boston: Academic Press, ISBN   0-12-587445-6
• Wilson, James Maurice (1868), Elementary Geometry (1st ed.), London: Macmillan and Co.
• Wylie, Jr., C. R. (1964), Foundations of Geometry, McGraw–Hill
• Papadopoulos, Athanase; Théret, Guillaume (2014), La théorie des parallèles de Johann Heinrich Lambert : Présentation, traduction et commentaires, Paris: Collection Sciences dans l'histoire, Librairie Albert Blanchard, ISBN   978-2-85367-266-5