20 Oct
2009
20 Oct
'09
5:21 p.m.
A "prime" is a subspace of codimension 1 --- at any rate, when flat. I've never hit upon nomenclature for these apparently common concepts that seems entirely satisfactory. "Hyperplane", though more popular, is etymological nonsense. "0-flat" for point, "1-flat" for line, etc is often useful when the dimension of space is fixed; but becomes clumsy when instead the subspace codimension is specified. "Coline" seems to work well for codimension 2; but "copoint" for 1? Nah! And when the space under discussion is a space of spheres rather than points, clear unambiguous nomenclature becomes twice as difficult ... WFL