geometry Getting started with geometry Questions to ask yourself

Example

When investigating some geometric problem, there are a number of questions you might want to ask yourself to narrow down the scope of the question.

• How many dimensions are you dealing with? Is it 2d, 3d, a specific number of higher dimensions, or without respect to dimensionality?
• In case of a 2d geometry, is it planar geometry, or is it e.g. spherical geometry, as one would encounter when dealing with geographic coordinates?
• Are you looking for exact solutions, or are numeric approximations acceptable? Actually doing exact geometry becomes quickly difficult, so using floating-point approximations is quite common in practice.
• Do you need to interface with a specific kind of framework? If so, how do they describe geometric objects. For most objects there are many possible descriptions, and although one can usually convert between them, these conversions tend to come at a cost, so a solution more in line with the required representations may be more useful.