[Image:Hypersphere coord.PNG|right|thumb|Just as a
stereographic projection can project a sphere's surface to a plane, it can also project the surface of a 3-sphere into 3-space. This image shows three coordinate directions projected to 3-space: parallels (red),
meridians (blue) and hypermeridians (green). Due to the
conformal property of the stereographic projection, the curves intersect each other orthogonally (in the yellow points) as in 4D. All of the curves are circles: the curves that intersect <0,0,0,1> have an infinite radius (= straight line).]] In
mathematics, the
n-sphere is the generalization of the ordinary
sphere to
spaces of arbitrary dimension. For any
natural number n, an
n-sphere of radius
r is defined as the set of points in (
n + 1)-dimensional
Euclidean space which are at distance
r from a central point, where the radius
r may be any
positive real number. Thus, the
n-sphere centred at the origin is defined by:
It is an
n-dimensional
manifold in Euclidean (
n + 1)-space.