In
mathematics
Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...
, a projective line is, roughly speaking, the extension of a usual
line by a point called a ''point at infinity''. The statement and the proof of many theorems of geometry are simplified by the resultant elimination of special cases; for example, two distinct projective lines in a
projective 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 in a single point, but there are some pairs of lines (namely, parallel lines) that do ...
meet in exactly one point (there is no "parallel" case).
There are many equivalent ways to formally define a projective line; one of the most common is to define a projective line over a
field
Field may refer to:
Expanses of open ground
* Field (agriculture), an area of land used for agricultural purposes
* Airfield, an aerodrome that lacks the infrastructure of an airport
* Battlefield
* Lawn, an area of mowed grass
* Meadow, a grass ...
''K'', commonly denoted P
1(''K''), as the set of one-dimensional
subspaces of a two-dimensional ''K''-
vector space
In mathematics and physics, a vector space (also called a linear space) is a set whose elements, often called ''vectors'', may be added together and multiplied ("scaled") by numbers called '' scalars''. Scalars are often real numbers, but can ...
. This definition is a special instance of the general definition of a
projective space
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 ...
.
The projective line over the
reals is a
manifold
In mathematics, a manifold is a topological space that locally resembles Euclidean space near each point. More precisely, an n-dimensional manifold, or ''n-manifold'' for short, is a topological space with the property that each point has a n ...
; see
real projective line
In geometry, a real projective line is a projective line over the real numbers. It is an extension of the usual concept of a line (geometry), line that has been historically introduced to solve a problem set by visual perspective (visual), perspect ...
for details.
Homogeneous coordinates
An arbitrary point in the projective line P
1(''K'') may be represented by an
equivalence class
In mathematics, when the elements of some set S have a notion of equivalence (formalized as an equivalence relation), then one may naturally split the set S into equivalence classes. These equivalence classes are constructed so that elements a ...
of ''
homogeneous coordinates
In mathematics, homogeneous coordinates or projective coordinates, introduced by August Ferdinand Möbius in his 1827 work , are a system of coordinates used in projective geometry, just as Cartesian coordinates are used in Euclidean geometry. T ...
'', which take the form of a pair
: