page_title: Stereographic projection
section_title: Complex analysis
hierarchical_section_title: Stereographic projection / Applications within mathematics / Complex analysis
context_page_description: In geometry, the stereographic projection is a particular mapping that projects a sphere onto a plane. The projection is defined on the entire sphere, except at one point: the projection point. Where it is defined, the mapping is smooth and bijective. It is conformal, meaning that it preserves angles at which curves meet. It is neither isometric nor area-preserving: that is, it preserves neither distances nor the areas of figures.
  Intuitively, then, the stereographic projection is a way of picturing the sphere as the plane, with some inevitable compromises. Because the sphere and the plane appear in many areas of mathematics and its applications, so does the stereographic projection; it finds use in diverse fields including complex analysis, cartography, geology, and photography. In practice, the projection is carried out by computer or by hand using a special kind of graph paper called a stereographic net, shortened to stereonet, or Wulff net.
context_section_description: Although any stereographic projection misses one point on the sphere (the projection point), the entire sphere can be mapped using two projections from distinct projection points. In other words, the sphere can be covered by two stereographic parametrizations (the inverses of the projections) from the plane. The parametrizations can be chosen to induce the same orientation on the sphere. Together, they describe the sphere as an oriented surface (or two-dimensional manifold).
  This construction has special significance in complex analysis. The point (X, Y) in the real plane can be identified with the complex number ζ = X + iY. The stereographic projection from the north pole onto the equatorial plane is then
  Similarly, letting ξ = X − iY be another complex coordinate, the functions
  define a stereographic projection from the south pole onto the equatorial plane. The transition maps between the ζ- and ξ-coordinates are then ζ =  and ξ = , with ζ approaching 0 as ξ goes to infinity, and vice versa. This facilitates an elegant and useful notion of infinity for the complex numbers and indeed an entire theory of meromorphic functions mapping to the Riemann sphere. The standard metric on the unit sphere agrees with the Fubini–Study metric on the Riemann sphere.
caption: The complex plane and the Riemann sphere above it