In geometry, a base is a side of a polygon or a face of a polyhedron, particularly one oriented perpendicular to the direction in which height is measured, or on what is considered to be the "bottom" of the figure. This term is commonly applied in plane geometry to triangles, parallelograms, trapezoids, and in solid geometry to cylinders, cones, pyramids, parallelepipeds, prisms, and frustums.
The side or point opposite the base is often called the apex or summit of the shape.
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A triangle is a polygon with three corners and three sides, one of the basic shapes in geometry. The corners, also called vertices, are zero-dimensional points while the sides connecting them, also called edges, are one-dimensional line segments. A triangle has three internal angles, each one bounded by a pair of adjacent edges; the sum of angles of a triangle always equals a straight angle (180 degrees or π radians). The triangle is a plane figure and its interior is a planar region. Sometimes an arbitrary edge is chosen to be the base, in which case the opposite vertex is called the apex; the shortest segment between the base and apex is the height. The area of a triangle equals one-half the product of height and base length.
In Euclidean geometry, any two points determine a unique line segment situated within a unique straight line, and any three points that do not all lie on the same straight line determine a unique triangle situated within a unique flat plane. More generally, four points in three-dimensional Euclidean space determine a solid figure called tetrahedron.
In geometry, an apex (pl.: apices) is the vertex which is in some sense the "highest" of the figure to which it belongs. The term is typically used to refer to the vertex opposite from some "base". The word is derived from the Latin for 'summit, peak, tip, top, extreme end'. The term apex may be used in different contexts:
The apothem (sometimes abbreviated as apo) of a regular polygon is a line segment from the center to the midpoint of one of its sides. Equivalently, it is the line drawn from the center of the polygon that is perpendicular to one of its sides. The word "apothem" can also refer to the length of that line segment and comes from the ancient Greek ἀπόθεμα ("put away, put aside"), made of ἀπό ("off, away") and θέμα ("that which is laid down"), indicating a generic line written down. Regular polygons are the only polygons that have apothems. Because of this, all the apothems in a polygon will be congruent.
In crystallography, the orthorhombic crystal system is one of the seven crystal systems. Orthorhombic lattices result from stretching a cubic lattice along two of its orthogonal pairs by two different factors, resulting in a rectangular prism with a rectangular base (a by b) and height (c), such that a, b, and c are distinct. All three bases intersect at 90° angles, so the three lattice vectors remain mutually orthogonal.
In geometry, a hyperpyramid is a generalisation of the normal pyramid to n dimensions.
In the case of the pyramid one connects all vertices of the base (a polygon in a plane) to a point outside the plane, which is the peak. The pyramid's height is the distance of the peak from the plane. This construction gets generalised to n dimensions. The base becomes a (n – 1)-polytope in a (n – 1)-dimensional hyperplane. A point called apex is located outside the hyperplane and gets connected to all the vertices of the polytope and the distance of the apex from the hyperplane is called height. This construct is called a n-dimensional hyperpyramid.
In geometry, an altitude of a triangle is a line segment through a given vertex (called apex) and perpendicular to a line containing the side or edge opposite the apex. This (finite) edge and (infinite) line extension are called, respectively, the base and extended base of the altitude. The point at the intersection of the extended base and the altitude is called the foot of the altitude. The length of the altitude, often simply called "the altitude" or "height", symbol h, is the distance between the foot and the apex. The process of drawing the altitude from a vertex to the foot is known as dropping the altitude at that vertex. It is a special case of orthogonal projection.
Altitudes can be used in the computation of the area of a triangle: one-half of the product of an altitude's length and its base's length (symbol b) equals the triangle's area: A=hb/2. Thus, the longest altitude is perpendicular to the shortest side of the triangle. The altitudes are also related to the sides of the triangle through the trigonometric functions.
In geometry, a prism is a polyhedron comprising an n-sided polygon base, a second base which is a translated copy (rigidly moved without rotation) of the first, and n other faces, necessarily all parallelograms, joining corresponding sides of the two bases. All cross-sections parallel to the bases are translations of the bases. Prisms are named after their bases, e.g. a prism with a pentagonal base is called a pentagonal prism. Prisms are a subclass of prismatoids.
Like many basic geometric terms, the word prism (from Greek πρίσμα (prisma) 'something sawed') was first used in Euclid's Elements. Euclid defined the term in Book XI as "a solid figure contained by two opposite, equal and parallel planes, while the rest are parallelograms". However, this definition has been criticized for not being specific enough in regard to the nature of the bases (a cause of some confusion amongst generations of later geometry writers).