Coordinate system

In geometry, a coordinate system is a system which uses one or more numbers, or coordinates, to uniquely determine the position of a point or other geometric element on a manifold such as Euclidean space. The order of the coordinates is significant and they are sometimes identified by their position in an ordered tuple and sometimes by a letter, as in "the x-coordinate". The coordinates are taken to be real numbers in elementary mathematics, but may be complex numbers or elements of a more abstract system such as a commutative ring. The use of a coordinate system allows problems in geometry to be translated into problems about numbers and vice versa; this is the basis of analytic geometry.

Common coordinate systems

Number line

The simplest example of a coordinate system is the identification of points on a line with real numbers using the number line. In this system, an arbitrary point O (the origin) is chosen on a given line. The coordinate of a point P is defined as the signed distance from O to P, where the signed distance is the distance taken as positive or negative depending on which side of the line P lies. Each point is given a unique coordinate and each real number is the coordinate of a unique point.

Basis (linear algebra)

A set of vectors in a vector space V is called a basis, or a set of basis vectors, if the vectors are linearly independent and every vector in the vector space is a linear combination of this set. In more general terms, a basis is a linearly independent spanning set.

Given a basis of a vector space V, every element of V can be expressed uniquely as a linear combination of basis vectors, whose coefficients are referred to as vector coordinates or components. A vector space can have several distinct sets of basis vectors; however each such set has the same number of elements, with this number being the dimension of the vector space.

Definition

A basis B of a vector space V over a field F is a linearly independent subset of V that spans V.

In more detail, suppose that B = { v₁, …, v_n } is a finite subset of a vector space V over a field F (such as the real or complex numbers R or C). Then B is a basis if it satisfies the following conditions:

Coordinate (disambiguation)

Coordinate may refer to:

See also