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Central inversion


In geometry, a point reflection or inversion in a point (or inversion through a point, or central inversion) is a type of isometry of Euclidean space. An object that is invariant under a point reflection is said to possess point symmetry; if it is invariant under point reflection through its center, it is said to possess central symmetry or to be centrally symmetric.

Point reflection can be classified as an affine transformation. Namely, it is an isometric involutive affine transformation, which has exactly one fixed point, which is the point of inversion. It is equivalent to a homothetic transformation with scale factor equal to −1. The point of inversion is also called homothetic center.

The term reflection is loose, and considered by some an abuse of language, with inversion preferred; however, point reflection is widely used. Such maps are involutions, meaning that they have order 2 – they are their own inverse: applying them twice yields the identity map – which is also true of other maps called reflections. More narrowly, a reflection refers to a reflection in a hyperplane ( dimensional affine subspace – a point on the line, a line in the plane, a plane in 3-space), with the hyperplane being fixed, but more broadly reflection is applied to any involution of Euclidean space, and the fixed set (an affine space of dimension k, where ) is called the mirror. In dimension 1 these coincide, as a point is a hyperplane in the line.


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