Point at infinity

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The real line with the point at infinity; it is called the real projective line. Real projective line.svg
The real line with the point at infinity; it is called the real projective line.

In geometry, a point at infinity or ideal point is an idealized limiting point at the "end" of each line.

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In the case of an affine plane (including the Euclidean plane), there is one ideal point for each pencil of parallel lines of the plane. Adjoining these points produces a projective plane, in which no point can be distinguished, if we "forget" which points were added. This holds for a geometry over any field, and more generally over any division ring. [1]

In the real case, a point at infinity completes a line into a topologically closed curve. In higher dimensions, all the points at infinity form a projective subspace of one dimension less than that of the whole projective space to which they belong. A point at infinity can also be added to the complex line (which may be thought of as the complex plane), thereby turning it into a closed surface known as the complex projective line, CP1, also called the Riemann sphere (when complex numbers are mapped to each point).

In the case of a hyperbolic space, each line has two distinct ideal points. Here, the set of ideal points takes the form of a quadric.

Affine geometry

In an affine or Euclidean space of higher dimension, the points at infinity are the points which are added to the space to get the projective completion.[ citation needed ] The set of the points at infinity is called, depending on the dimension of the space, the line at infinity, the plane at infinity or the hyperplane at infinity, in all cases a projective space of one less dimension. [2]

As a projective space over a field is a smooth algebraic variety, the same is true for the set of points at infinity. Similarly, if the ground field is the real or the complex field, the set of points at infinity is a manifold.

Perspective

In artistic drawing and technical perspective, the projection on the picture plane of the point at infinity of a class of parallel lines is called their vanishing point. [3]

Hyperbolic geometry

In hyperbolic geometry, points at infinity are typically named ideal points. [4] Unlike Euclidean and elliptic geometries, each line has two points at infinity: given a line l and a point P not on l, the right- and left-limiting parallels converge asymptotically to different points at infinity.

All points at infinity together form the Cayley absolute or boundary of a hyperbolic plane.

Projective geometry

A symmetry of points and lines arises in a projective plane: just as a pair of points determine a line, so a pair of lines determine a point. The existence of parallel lines leads to establishing a point at infinity which represents the intersection of these parallels. This axiomatic symmetry grew out of a study of graphical perspective where a parallel projection arises as a central projection where the center C is a point at infinity, or figurative point. [5] The axiomatic symmetry of points and lines is called duality.

Though a point at infinity is considered on a par with any other point of a projective range, in the representation of points with projective coordinates, distinction is noted: finite points are represented with a 1 in the final coordinate while a point at infinity has a 0 there. The need to represent points at infinity requires that one extra coordinate beyond the space of finite points is needed.

Other generalisations

This construction can be generalized to topological spaces. Different compactifications may exist for a given space, but arbitrary topological space admits Alexandroff extension, also called the one-point compactification when the original space is not itself compact. Projective line (over arbitrary field) is the Alexandroff extension of the corresponding field. Thus the circle is the one-point compactification of the real line, and the sphere is the one-point compactification of the plane. Projective spaces Pn for n > 1 are not one-point compactifications of corresponding affine spaces for the reason mentioned above under § Affine geometry, and completions of hyperbolic spaces with ideal points are also not one-point compactifications.

See also

Related Research Articles

In mathematics, in general topology, compactification is the process or result of making a topological space into a compact space. A compact space is a space in which every open cover of the space contains a finite subcover. The methods of compactification are various, but each is a way of controlling points from "going off to infinity" by in some way adding "points at infinity" or preventing such an "escape".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Euclidean space</span> Fundamental space of geometry

Euclidean space is the fundamental space of geometry, intended to represent physical space. Originally, in Euclid's Elements, it was the three-dimensional space of Euclidean geometry, but in modern mathematics there are Euclidean spaces of any positive integer dimension n, which are called Euclidean n-spaces when one wants to specify their dimension. For n equal to one or two, they are commonly called respectively Euclidean lines and Euclidean planes. The qualifier "Euclidean" is used to distinguish Euclidean spaces from other spaces that were later considered in physics and modern mathematics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Projective plane</span> Geometric concept of a 2D space with a "point at infinity" adjoined

In mathematics, a projective plane is a geometric structure that extends the concept of a plane. In the ordinary Euclidean plane, two lines typically intersect at a single point, but there are some pairs of lines that do not intersect. A projective plane can be thought of as an ordinary plane equipped with additional "points at infinity" where parallel lines intersect. Thus any two distinct lines in a projective plane intersect at exactly one point.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hyperplane</span> Subspace of n-space whose dimension is (n-1)

In geometry, a hyperplane is a generalization of a two-dimensional plane in three-dimensional space to mathematical spaces of arbitrary dimension. Like a plane in space, a hyperplane is a flat hypersurface, a subspace whose dimension is one less than that of the ambient space. Two lower-dimensional examples of hyperplanes are one-dimensional lines in a plane and zero-dimensional points on a line.

Elliptic geometry is an example of a geometry in which Euclid's parallel postulate does not hold. Instead, as in spherical geometry, there are no parallel lines since any two lines must intersect. However, unlike in spherical geometry, two lines are usually assumed to intersect at a single point. Because of this, the elliptic geometry described in this article is sometimes referred to as single elliptic geometry whereas spherical geometry is sometimes referred to as double elliptic geometry.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hyperbolic geometry</span> Non-Euclidean geometry

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

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Projective space</span> Completion of the usual space with "points at infinity"

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, projective geometry is the study of geometric properties that are invariant with respect to projective transformations. This means that, compared to elementary Euclidean geometry, projective geometry has a different setting, projective space, and a selective set of basic geometric concepts. The basic intuitions are that projective space has more points than Euclidean space, for a given dimension, and that geometric transformations are permitted that transform the extra points to Euclidean points, and vice versa.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Affine geometry</span> Euclidean geometry without distance and angles

In mathematics, affine geometry is what remains of Euclidean geometry when ignoring the metric notions of distance and angle.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Affine space</span> Euclidean space without distance and angles

In mathematics, an affine space is a geometric structure that generalizes some of the properties of Euclidean spaces in such a way that these are independent of the concepts of distance and measure of angles, keeping only the properties related to parallelism and ratio of lengths for parallel line segments. Affine space is the setting for affine geometry.

In geometry and topology, the line at infinity is a projective line that is added to the real (affine) plane in order to give closure to, and remove the exceptional cases from, the incidence properties of the resulting projective plane. The line at infinity is also called the ideal line.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Real projective plane</span> Compact non-orientable two-dimensional manifold

In mathematics, the real projective plane is an example of a compact non-orientable two-dimensional manifold; in other words, a one-sided surface. It cannot be embedded in standard three-dimensional space without intersecting itself. It has basic applications to geometry, since the common construction of the real projective plane is as the space of lines in R3 passing through the origin.

In geometry, parallel lines are coplanar infinite straight lines that do not intersect at any point. Parallel planes are planes in the same three-dimensional space that never meet. Parallel curves are curves that do not touch each other or intersect and keep a fixed minimum distance. In three-dimensional Euclidean space, a line and a plane that do not share a point are also said to be parallel. However, two noncoplanar lines are called skew lines. Line segments and Euclidean vectors are parallel if they have the same direction.

In mathematics, a projection is an idempotent mapping of a set into a subset. In this case, idempotent means that projecting twice is the same as projecting once. The restriction to a subspace of a projection is also called a projection, even if the idempotence property is lost. An everyday example of a projection is the casting of shadows onto a plane : the projection of a point is its shadow on the sheet of paper, and the projection (shadow) of a point on the sheet of paper is that point itself (idempotency). The shadow of a three-dimensional sphere is a closed disk. Originally, the notion of projection was introduced in Euclidean geometry to denote the projection of the three-dimensional Euclidean space onto a plane in it, like the shadow example. The two main projections of this kind are:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Surface (mathematics)</span> Mathematical idealization of the surface of a body

In mathematics, a surface is a mathematical model of the common concept of a surface. It is a generalization of a plane, but, unlike a plane, it may be curved; this is analogous to a curve generalizing a straight line.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Beltrami–Klein model</span> Model of hyperbolic geometry

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Space (mathematics)</span> Mathematical set with some added structure

In mathematics, a space is a set with some added structure. While modern mathematics uses many types of spaces, such as Euclidean spaces, linear spaces, topological spaces, Hilbert spaces, or probability spaces, it does not define the notion of "space" itself.

In mathematics, a plane is a two-dimensional space or flat surface that extends indefinitely. A plane is the two-dimensional analogue of a point, a line and three-dimensional space.

A two-dimensional space is a mathematical space with two dimensions, meaning points have two degrees of freedom: their locations can be locally described with two coordinates or they can move in two independent directions. Common two-dimensional spaces are often called planes, or, more generally, surfaces.

References

  1. Weisstein, Eric W. "Point at Infinity". mathworld.wolfram.com. Wolfram Research. Retrieved 28 December 2016.
  2. Coxeter, H. S. M. (1987). Projective Geometry (2nd ed.). Springer-Verlag. p. 109.
  3. Faugeras, Olivier; Luong, Quang-Tuan (2001). The Geometry of Multiple Images: The Laws That Govern the Formation of Multiple Images of a Scene and Some of Their Applications. MIT Press. p. 19. ISBN   978-0262062206.
  4. Kay, David C. (2011). College Geometry: A Unified Development. CRC Press. p. 548.
  5. Halsted, G. B. (1906). Synthetic Projective Geometry. p. 7.