upon a plane was used by Ptolemy (~150) in his Planisphaerium. The method is called stereographic projection and uses a plane tangent to a sphere and a pole C diametrically opposite the point of tangency. Any point P on the sphere besides C determines a line CP intersecting the plane at the projected point for P. The correspondence makes the sphere a one-point compactification for the plane when a point at infinity is included to correspond to C, which otherwise has no projection on the plane. A common instance is the complex plane where the compactification corresponds to the Riemann sphere. Alternatively, a hemisphere is frequently projected onto a plane using the gnomonic projection. In linear algebra, a linear transformation that remains unchanged if applied twice: p(u) = p(p(u)). In other words, an idempotent operator. For example, the mapping that takes a point (x, y, z) in three dimensions to the point (x, y, 0) is a projection. This type of projection naturally generalizes to any number of dimensions n for the domain and k ≤ n for the codomain of the mapping. See Orthogonal projection, Projection (linear algebra). In the case of orthogonal projections, the space admits a decomposition as a product, and the projection operator is a projection in that sense as well. In differential topology, any fiber bundle includes a projection map as part of its definition. Locally at least this map looks like a projection map in the sense of the product topology and is therefore open and surjective. In topology, a retraction is a continuous map r: X → X which restricts to the identity map on its image. This satisfies a similar idempotency condition r2 = r and can be considered a generalization of the projection map. The image of a retraction is called a retract of the original space. A retraction which is homotopic to the identity is known as a deformation retraction. This term is also used in category theory to refer to any split epimorphism. The scalar projection (or resolute) of one vector onto another. In category theory, the above notion of Cartesian product of sets can be generalized to arbitrary categories. The product of some objects has a canonical projection morphism to each factor. This projection will take many forms in different categories. The projection from the Cartesian product of sets, the product topology of topological spaces (which is always