Line (geometry)

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 idealisation 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.

Properties

In the Greek deductive geometry of Euclid's Elements, a general line (now called a curve) is defined as a "breadthless length", and a straight line (now called a line segment) was defined as a line "which lies evenly with the points on itself". These definitions appeal to readers' physical experience, relying on terms that are not themselves defined, and the definitions are never explicitly referenced in the remainder of the text. In modern geometry, a line is usually either taken as a primitive notion with properties given by axioms, or else defined as a set of points obeying a linear relationship, for instance when real numbers are taken to be primitive and geometry is established analytically in terms of numerical coordinates.

In an axiomatic formulation of Euclidean geometry, such as that of Hilbert (modern mathematicians added to Euclid's original axioms to fill perceived logical gaps), a line is stated to have certain properties that relate it to other lines and points.