A hyperplane in
is the set of solutions of a single linear
equation with coefficients not all equal to 0.
More explicitly, it consists of all vectors
such that
for fixed scalars ,
,
...,
not all equal to 0 and a constant
. This is an affine
space of dimension
. It is a vector subspace of
iff
.
More generally, a linear hyperplane is a codimension-1 subspace of a vector space
. Equivalently, the quotient
vector space
is one-dimensional, or
is the linear transformation kernel
of a nonzero linear
functional on
.
A linear hyperplane is also called a hyperspace (Hoffman
and Kunze 1971, pp. 101, 109-110). An affine hyperplane is obtained by applying
a translation to a linear hyperplane and need not
contain the origin.
Two nonzero linear functionals have the same linear transformation kernel iff one is a nonzero scalar multiple of the other (Hoffman and Kunze 1971, p. 110).