The origin of the stereographic projection is not known, but it is believed to have been discovered by Ancient Greek astronomers and used for projecting the celestial sphere to the plane so that the motions of stars and planet… See more

The unit sphere S in three-dimensional space R is the set of points (x, y, z) such that x + y + z = 1. Let N = (0, 0, 1) be the "north pole", and let M be the rest of the sphere. The plane z = 0 runs through the center of th… See more

The first stereographic projection defined in the preceding section sends the "south pole" (0, 0, −1) of the unit sphere to (0, 0), the equator to the unit circle, the southern hemisphere to the region inside the circle, and the nor… See more

Stereographic projection plots can be carried out by a computer using the explicit formulas given above. However, for graphing by hand these formulas are unwieldy. Instead, it is common to use graph pape… See more