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In geometry, a point is an abstract idealization of an exact position, without size, in physical space, [1] or its generalization to other kinds of mathematical spaces.As zero-dimensional objects, points are usually taken to be the fundamental indivisible elements comprising the space, of which one-dimensional curves, two-dimensional surfaces, and higher-dimensional objects consist.
For example, the dimension of a point is zero; the dimension of a line is one, as a point can move on a line in only one direction (or its opposite); the dimension of a plane is two, etc. The dimension is an intrinsic property of an object, in the sense that it is independent of the dimension of the space in which the object is or can be embedded.
He did not change the subdivisions (1 inch = 12 subdivisions = 72 points), but defined it strictly in terms of the royal foot, a legal length measure in France: the Didot point is exactly 1 ⁄ 864 of a French foot or 1 ⁄ 72 of a French inch, that is (by 1799) 15 625 ⁄ 41 559 mm or about 0.375 972 mm. Accordingly, one Didot point is exactly ...
Physical quantities that have different dimensions (such as time and length) cannot be equated even if they are numerically equal (e.g., 1 second is not the same as 1 metre). In theoretical physics, however, this scruple may be set aside, by a process called nondimensionalization. The effective result is that many fundamental equations of ...
It has been argued that quantities defined as ratios Q = A/B having equal dimensions in numerator and denominator are actually only unitless quantities and still have physical dimension defined as dim Q = dim A × dim B −1. [21]
In a Cartesian plane, one can define canonical representatives of certain geometric figures, such as the unit circle (with radius equal to the length unit, and center at the origin), the unit square (whose diagonal has endpoints at (0, 0) and (1, 1)), the unit hyperbola, and so on.
Unlike in a geodesic metric space, the infimum does not have to be attained. An example of a length space which is not geodesic is the Euclidean plane minus the origin: the points (1, 0) and (-1, 0) can be joined by paths of length arbitrarily close to 2, but not by a path of length 2. An example of a metric space which is not a length space is ...
Thus there is typically consistency in scale among quantities of the same dimension, but otherwise scale ratios may vary; for example, if "1 newton" and "5 m" are both represented with an arrow of 2 cm, the scales are 1 m:50 N and 1:250 respectively. Equal length of vectors of different dimension has no particular significance unless there is ...