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The Straight Line

4,776 views · Published 6 May 2010 · 7:07 · Indexed 5 October 2026

Channel: Educational Videos · 2010 · Education

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Straight Line

In Euclidean geometry, a line is a straight curve. When geometry is used to model the real world, lines are used to represent straight objects with negligible width and height. Lines are an idealisation of such objects and have no width or height at all and are usually considered to be infinitely long. Lines are a fundamental concept in some approaches to geometry such as Euclid's, but in others such as analytic geometry and Tarski's axioms they enter as derived notions defined in terms of more fundamental primitives such as points.
A line segment is a part of a line that is bounded by two distinct end points and contains every point on the line between its end points. Depending on how the line segment is defined, either of the two end points may or may not be part of the line segment. Two or more line segments may have some of the same relationships as lines, such as being parallel, intersecting, or skew.
When geometry was first formalised by Euclid in Elements, he defined lines to be "breadthless length" with a straight line being a line "which lies evenly with the points on itself". These definitions serve little purpose since they use terms which are not, themselves, defined. In fact, Euclid did not use these definitions in work and probably included them just to make it clear to the reader what was being discussed. In modern geometry, a line is simply taken as an undefined object with properties given by postulates.
In an axiomatic formulation of Euclidean geometry, such as that of Hilbert (Euclid's original axioms contained various flaws which have been corrected by modern mathematicians),a line is stated to have certain properties which relate it to other lines and points. For example, for any two distinct points, there is a unique line containing them, and any two distinct lines intersect at most one point. In two dimensions, ie. the Euclidean plane, two lines which do not intersect are called parallel. In higher dimensions, two lines that do not intersect may be parallel if they are contained in a plane, or skew if they are not.
Any collection of finitely many lines partitions the plane into convex polygons (possibly unbounded); this partition is known as an arrangement of lines.

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