Chirality (mathematics)

In geometry, a figure is chiral (and said to have chirality) if it is not identical to its , or, more precisely, if it cannot be mapped to its mirror image by rotations and translations alone. An object that is not chiral is said to be achiral. A chiral object and its mirror image are said to be enantiomorphs. The word chirality is derived from the Greek χείρ (cheir), the hand, the most familiar chiral object; the word enantiomorph stems from the Greek ἐναντίος (enantios) 'opposite' + μορφή (morphe) 'form'. Some chiral three-dimensional objects, such as the helix, can be assigned a right or left handedness, according to the right-hand rule. Many other familiar objects exhibit the same chiral symmetry of the human body, such as gloves and shoes. Right shoes differ from left shoes only by being mirror images of each other. In contrast thin gloves may not be considered chiral if you can wear them inside-out. The J, L, S and Z-shaped tetrominoes of the popular video game Tetris also exhibit chirality, but only in a two-dimensional space. Individually they contain no mirror symmetry in the plane. A figure is achiral if and only if its symmetry group contains at least one orientation-reversing isometry. (In Euclidean geometry any isometry can be written as with an orthogonal matrix and a vector . The determinant of is either 1 or −1 then. If it is −1 the isometry is orientation-reversing, otherwise it is orientation-preserving. A general definition of chirality based on group theory exists. It does not refer to any orientation concept: an isometry is direct if and only if it is a product of squares of isometries, and if not, it is an indirect isometry. The resulting chirality definition works in spacetime. In two dimensions, every figure which possesses an axis of symmetry is achiral, and it can be shown that every bounded achiral figure must have an axis of symmetry. (An axis of symmetry of a figure is a line , such that is invariant under the mapping , when is chosen to be the -axis of the coordinate system.