2-sphere wireframe as an orthogonal projectionJust as a stereographic projection can project a sphere's surface to a plane, it can also project a 3-sphere into 3-space. This image shows three coordinate directions projected to 3-space: parallels (red), meridians (blue), and hypermeridians (green). Due to the conformal property of the stereographic projection, the curves intersect each other orthogonally (in the yellow points) as in 4D. All of the curves are circles: the curves that intersect ⟨0,0,0,1⟩ have an infinite radius (= straight line).
Considered extrinsically, as a hypersurface embedded in -dimensional Euclidean space, an -sphere is the locus of points at equal distance (the radius) from a given center point. Its interior, consisting of all points closer to the center than the radius, is an -dimensional ball. In particular:
The -sphere is the pair of points at the ends of a line segment (-ball).
In the more general setting of topology, any topological space that is homeomorphic to the unit -sphere is called an -sphere. Under inverse stereographic projection, the -sphere is the one-point compactification of -space. The -spheres admit several other topological descriptions: for example, they can be constructed by gluing two -dimensional spaces together, by identifying the boundary of an -cube with a point, or (inductively) by forming the suspension of an -sphere. When it is simply connected; the -sphere (circle) is not simply connected; the -sphere is not even connected, consisting of two discrete points.