Projective geometry in the context of "Translation (geometry)"

Pappus of Alexandria (/ˈpæpəs/ ; Ancient Greek: Πάππος ὁ Ἀλεξανδρεύς; c. 290 – c.  350 AD) was a Greek mathematician of late antiquity known for his Synagoge (Συναγωγή) or Collection (c. 340), and for Pappus's hexagon theorem in projective geometry. Almost nothing is known about his life except for what can be found in his own writings, many of which are lost. Pappus apparently lived in Alexandria, where he worked as a mathematics teacher to higher level students, one of whom was named Hermodorus.

The Collection, his best-known work, is a compendium of mathematics in eight volumes, the bulk of which survives. It covers a wide range of topics that were part of the ancient mathematics curriculum, including geometry, astronomy, and mechanics.

In astronomy and navigation, the celestial sphere is an abstract sphere that has an arbitrarily large radius and is concentric to Earth. All objects in the sky can be conceived as being projected upon the inner surface of the celestial sphere, which may be centered on Earth or the observer. If centered on the observer, half of the sphere would resemble a hemispherical screen over the observing location.

The celestial sphere is a conceptual tool used in spherical astronomy to specify the position of an object in the sky without consideration of its linear distance from the observer. The celestial equator divides the celestial sphere into northern and southern hemispheres.

In cartography, a map projection is any of a broad set of transformations employed to represent the curved two-dimensional surface of a globe on a plane. In a map projection, coordinates, often expressed as latitude and longitude, of locations from the surface of the globe are transformed to coordinates on a plane.Projection is a necessary step in creating a two-dimensional map and is one of the essential elements of cartography.

All projections of a sphere on a plane necessarily distort the surface in some way. Depending on the purpose of the map, some distortions are acceptable and others are not; therefore, different map projections exist in order to preserve some properties of the sphere-like body at the expense of other properties. The study of map projections is primarily about the characterization of their distortions. There is no limit to the number of possible map projections.More generally, projections are considered in several fields of pure mathematics, including differential geometry, projective geometry, and manifolds. However, the term "map projection" refers specifically to a cartographic projection.

In geometry, a straight line, usually abbreviated line, is an infinitely long object with no width, depth, or curvature. It is a special case of a curve and an idealization of such physical objects as a straightedge, a taut string, or a ray of light. Lines are spaces of dimension one, which may be embedded in spaces of dimension two, three, or higher. The word line may also refer, in everyday life, to a line segment, which is a part of a line delimited by two points (its endpoints).

Euclid's Elements defines a straight line as a "breadthless length" that "lies evenly with respect to the points on itself", and introduced several postulates as basic unprovable properties on which the rest of geometry was established. Euclidean line and Euclidean geometry are terms introduced to avoid confusion with generalizations introduced since the end of the 19th century, such as non-Euclidean, projective, and affine geometry.

The equatorial coordinate system is a celestial coordinate system widely used to specify the positions of celestial objects. It may be implemented in spherical or rectangular coordinates, both defined by an origin at the centre of Earth, a fundamental plane consisting of the projection of Earth's equator onto the celestial sphere (forming the celestial equator), a primary direction towards the March equinox, and a right-handed convention.

The origin at the centre of Earth means the coordinates are geocentric, that is, as seen from the centre of Earth as if it were transparent. The fundamental plane and the primary direction mean that the coordinate system, while aligned with Earth's equator and pole, does not rotate with the Earth, but remains relatively fixed against the background stars. A right-handed convention means that coordinates increase northward from and eastward around the fundamental plane.

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 (namely, parallel 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.

Renaissance artists, in developing the techniques of drawing in perspective, laid the groundwork for this mathematical topic. The archetypical example is the real projective plane, also known as the extended Euclidean plane. This example, in slightly different guises, is important in algebraic geometry, topology and projective geometry where it may be denoted variously by PG(2, R), RP, or P₂(R), among other notations. There are many other projective planes, both infinite, such as the complex projective plane, and finite, such as the Fano plane.

In projective geometry, a homography is an isomorphism of projective spaces, induced by an isomorphism of the vector spaces from which the projective spaces derive. It is a bijection that maps lines to lines, and thus a collineation. In general, some collineations are not homographies, but the fundamental theorem of projective geometry asserts that is not so in the case of real projective spaces of dimension at least two. Synonyms include projectivity, projective transformation, and projective collineation.

Historically, homographies (and projective spaces) have been introduced to study perspective and projections in Euclidean geometry, and the term homography, which, etymologically, roughly means "similar drawing", dates from this time. At the end of the 19th century, formal definitions of projective spaces were introduced, which extended Euclidean and affine spaces by the addition of new points called points at infinity. The term "projective transformation" originated in these abstract constructions. These constructions divide into two classes that have been shown to be equivalent. A projective space may be constructed as the set of the lines of a vector space over a given field (the above definition is based on this version); this construction facilitates the definition of projective coordinates and allows using the tools of linear algebra for the study of homographies. The alternative approach consists in defining the projective space through a set of axioms, which do not involve explicitly any field (incidence geometry, see also synthetic geometry); in this context, collineations are easier to define than homographies, and homographies are defined as specific collineations, thus called "projective collineations".