Hyperplane

In geometry, a hyperplane is a generalization of a two-dimensional plane in three-dimensional space to mathematical spaces of arbitrary dimension. Like a plane in space, a hyperplane is a flat hypersurface, a subspace whose dimension is one less than that of the ambient space. Two lower-dimensional examples of hyperplanes are one-dimensional lines in a plane and zero-dimensional points on a line.

Most commonly, the ambient space is n-dimensional Euclidean space, in which case the hyperplanes are the (n − 1)-dimensional "flats", each of which separates the space into two half spaces. A reflection across a hyperplane is a kind of motion (geometric transformation preserving distance between points), and the group of all motions is generated by the reflections. A convex polytope is the intersection of half-spaces.

In non-Euclidean geometry, the ambient space might be the n-dimensional sphere or hyperbolic space, or more generally a pseudo-Riemannian space form, and the hyperplanes are the hypersurfaces consisting of all geodesics through a point which are perpendicular to a specific normal geodesic.

In other kinds of ambient spaces, some properties from Euclidean space are no longer relevant. For example, in affine space, there is no concept of distance, so there are no reflections or motions. In a non-orientable space such as elliptic space or projective space, there is no concept of half-planes. In greatest generality, the notion of hyperplane is meaningful in any mathematical space in which the concept of the dimension of a subspace is defined.

The difference in dimension between a subspace and its ambient space is known as its codimension. A hyperplane has codimension 1.

In geometry, a hyperplane of an n-dimensional space V is a subspace of dimension n − 1, or equivalently, of codimension 1 in V. The space V may be a Euclidean space or more generally an affine space, or a vector space or a projective space, and the notion of hyperplane varies correspondingly since the definition of subspace differs in these settings; in all cases however, any hyperplane can be given in coordinates as the solution of a single (due to the "codimension 1" constraint) algebraic equation of degree 1.

If V is a vector space, one distinguishes "vector hyperplanes" (which are linear subspaces, and therefore must pass through the origin) and "affine hyperplanes" (which need not pass through the origin; they can be obtained by translation of a vector hyperplane). A hyperplane in a Euclidean space separates that space into two half spaces, and defines a reflection that fixes the hyperplane and interchanges those two half spaces.

Several specific types of hyperplanes are defined with properties that are well suited for particular purposes. Some of these specializations are described here.