Isometry group in the context of Identity element

In geometry, a centre (Commonwealth English) or center (American English) (from Ancient Greek κέντρον (kéntron) 'pointy object') of an object is a point in some sense in the middle of the object. According to the specific definition of centre taken into consideration, an object might have no centre. If geometry is regarded as the study of isometry groups, then a centre is a fixed point of all the isometries that move the object onto itself.

In group theory, the symmetry group of a geometric object is the group of all transformations under which the object is invariant, endowed with the group operation of composition. Such a transformation is an invertible mapping of the ambient space which takes the object to itself, and which preserves all the relevant structure of the object. A frequent notation for the symmetry group of an object X is G = Sym(X).

For an object in a metric space, its symmetries form a subgroup of the isometry group of the ambient space. This article mainly considers symmetry groups in Euclidean geometry, but the concept may also be studied for more general types of geometric structure.

The Poincaré group, named after Henri Poincaré (1905), was first defined by Hermann Minkowski (1908) as the isometry group of Minkowski spacetime. It is a ten-dimensional non-abelian Lie group that is of importance as a model in our understanding of the most basic fundamentals of physics.