Can 3D co-ordinates be transferred into 2D co-ordinates?

Question

Is it possible to transform co-ordinates $(a,b,c)$ into $(x,y) $ such that $(x,y)$ is unique for each $(a,b,c)$ ? $a, b, c, x, y$ are in $\Bbb{R}$ .

Answer 1

It's is possible to have a bijection between $\mathbb{R}^3$ and $\mathbb{R}^2$, since it can be shown that $\mathbb{R}$ and $\mathbb{R}^2$, and hence every $\mathbb{R}^n$ has the same cardinality. But a linear or affine isomorphism is not possible if the dimensions are different.

Answer 2

It is possible, but it's not pretty, and as VENKITESH says, it's certainly not linear. Here is one way: define $$f(a,b,c)=(x,y)$$ where $x=a$, and $y$ is the alternating decimal expansion of $b$ and $c$. What that means is this:

Take the non-terminating decimal expansions of $b$ and $c$; if necessary, insert leading zeroes so that the integral parts have the same length. For instance, if $b=1234.345$ and $c=76.987698798\ldots$, we convert $b$ to its non-terminating form $b=\color{red}{1234.344999999\ldots}$, and we write $c$ as $\color{blue}{0076.987698798\ldots}$ to make the lengths before the decimal point equal.

Now we can write $y$ by taking digits from $b$ and $c$ in turn:

$$y=\color{red}{1}\color{blue}{0}\color{red}{2}\color{blue}{0}\color{red}{3}\color{blue}{7}\color{red}{4}\color{blue}{6}.\color{red}{3}\color{blue}{9}\color{red}{4}\color{blue}{8}\color{red}{4}\color{blue}{7}\color{red}{9}\color{blue}{6}\color{red}{9}\color{blue}{9}\color{red}{9}\color{blue}{8}\color{red}{9}\color{blue}{7}\color{red}{9}\color{blue}{9}\color{red}{9}\color{blue}{8}\ldots$$

This is just one way. By the way, the name alternating decimal expansion is something I just made up, so don't take it too seriously.

Edited to add: I see you changed your criteria in a comment. This mapping is an injection, but not a surjection, so it doesn't have an inverse. You can make it surjective, but it's messy, and I'm not going to do it here.

Edited to add: As the OP points out in a comment, I have not define the mapping for $b,c\le 0$. My bad! But you can fix this by using the decimal expansions of $e^b$ and $e^c$, which are always strictly greater than zero.