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Concept
Isometry
Summary
In mathematics, an isometry (or congruence, or congruent transformation) is a distance-preserving transformation between metric spaces, usually assumed to be bijective. The word isometry is derived from the Ancient Greek: ἴσος isos meaning "equal", and μέτρον metron meaning "measure".
Given a metric space (loosely, a set and a scheme for assigning distances between elements of the set), an isometry is a transformation which maps elements to the same or another metric space such that the distance between the image elements in the new metric space is equal to the distance between the elements in the original metric space.
In a two-dimensional or three-dimensional Euclidean space, two geometric figures are congruent if they are related by an isometry;
the isometry that relates them is either a rigid motion (translation or rotation), or a composition of a rigid motion and a reflection.
Isometries are often used in constructions where one space is embedded in another space. For instance, the completion of a metric space involves an isometry from into a quotient set of the space of Cauchy sequences on
The original space is thus isometrically isomorphic to a subspace of a complete metric space, and it is usually identified with this subspace.
Other embedding constructions show that every metric space is isometrically isomorphic to a closed subset of some normed vector space and that every complete metric space is isometrically isomorphic to a closed subset of some Banach space.
An isometric surjective linear operator on a Hilbert space is called a unitary operator.
Let and be metric spaces with metrics (e.g., distances) and
A map is called an isometry or distance preserving if for any one has
An isometry is automatically injective; otherwise two distinct points, a and b, could be mapped to the same point, thereby contradicting the coincidence axiom of the metric d.
This proof is similar to the proof that an order embedding between partially ordered sets is injective. Clearly, every isometry between metric spaces is a topological embedding.
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