Affine hull

In mathematics, the affine hull or affine span of a set S in Euclidean space Rn is the smallest affine set containing S,[1] or equivalently, the intersection of all affine sets containing S. Here, an affine set may be defined as the translation of a vector subspace.

The affine hull aff(S) of S is the set of all affine combinations of elements of S, that is,

Examples

  • The affine hull of the empty set is the empty set.
  • The affine hull of a singleton (a set made of one single element) is the singleton itself.
  • The affine hull of a set of two different points is the line through them.
  • The affine hull of a set of three points not on one line is the plane going through them.
  • The affine hull of a set of four points not in a plane in R3 is the entire space R3.

Properties

For any subsets

  • is a closed set if is finite dimensional.
  • If then .
  • If then is a linear subspace of .
  • .
    • So in particular, is always a vector subspace of .
  • If is convex then
  • For every , where is the smallest cone containing (here, a set is a cone if for all and all non-negative ).
    • Hence is always a linear subspace of parallel to .
  • If instead of an affine combination one uses a convex combination, that is one requires in the formula above that all be non-negative, one obtains the convex hull of S, which cannot be larger than the affine hull of S as more restrictions are involved.
  • The notion of conical combination gives rise to the notion of the conical hull
  • If however one puts no restrictions at all on the numbers , instead of an affine combination one has a linear combination, and the resulting set is the linear span of S, which contains the affine hull of S.

References

  1. Roman 2008, p. 430 §16

Sources

  • R.J. Webster, Convexity, Oxford University Press, 1994. ISBN 0-19-853147-8.
  • Roman, Stephen (2008), Advanced Linear Algebra, Graduate Texts in Mathematics (Third ed.), Springer, ISBN 978-0-387-72828-5
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