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▲Making Peace with the Projective Plane (johndcook.com)
nh23423fefe 7 minutes ago [-]
The only time i've understood applications of projective geometry was seeing rotations and translations unified using exponentials of bivectors. I still dont get homogenous coords. Like i get how f(lambda*x)=lambda^n*f(x) and that means f is like a homomorphism but i've never solved any problem sets and understood why one would do this in the first place. I get what stereographic projection is, but can't apply it to problems.

whereas i constantly see applications of other math objects i've learned about. i never hear myself think, 'oooh yeah thats projective and so...'

abetusk 7 minutes ago [-]
The motivation is better than most, trying to treat infinity as just another case instead of an exceptional one, but, to me at least, it still feels like a "hack" to put in a third dimension and then insist on dividing by it to reproject whenever you want to do anything useful.

I'm a little used to the trick but it'd be nice to give some deeper motivation of why the trick works in the first place and why this particular representation.

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