Xah Lee, 2006-08
above: A grid on the floor projected onto a ball.
Mathematica notebook: sphere_proj_illus.nb.zip.
Suppose you have a beach ball sitting on a elaborately beautifully tiled floor. Now, suppose the top of the beach ball we call it Norht Pole. Now, Let there be a straight line from the north pole to a point on the floor. Call this point P. This line will intersect the beach ball somewhere, let's call the point of intersection Q. Now, every point P on the floor will then have a corresponding point Q on the ball. This process, of making a image from the floor to the ball is called Stereographic Projection. The following are some examples.
The Java Applet for live rotation on this page is JavaView, by Konrad Polthier et al. See: http://www.javaview.de/.
The images on this page is generated by the following Mathematica packages:
For more info about stereographic projection, see Stereographic projection↗.
See also: Geometric Transformation on the Plane.
Page created: 2006-08. © 2006 by Xah Lee.