Any general rules as to when an affine space is a vector subspace and when it's not?

126 Views Asked by At

Any general rules as to when an affine space is a vector subspace and when it's not?

Because Wikipedia example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affine_space#/media/File:Affine_space_R3.png

says that in that case $P_2$ is not a subspace.

However the article gives in many parts that an affine space is a subspace. However, does this not even imply that it could be a vector/linear subspace in some cases?


The article also write:

Any vector space may be considered as an affine space

So this means that affine spaces can be vector spaces without the null vector property?

1

There are 1 best solutions below

4
On

An affine space is a linear subspace if and only if the affine space contains the null vector.

The nomenclature makes sense if you think about an affine function. If it goes through 0, it is a linear function.