Introduction

• Cartesian coordinates are a way of describing the location of a point in space.
• For two dimensional space, two axis are defined, x and y, which are right angles (orthogonal) to each other:
• A point in space can then be described by how far it is from each axis:
• The x coordinate describes how far the point is from the y axis, in this case it is 70.
• The y coordinate describes how far the point is from the x axis, in this case it is 50.
• The point is represented as a pair of coordinates (x, y), in this case it is (70, 50).

Higher dimensions

• Cartesian coordinates can be used to represent coordinates in higher dimensions too.
• For example, (2, 3, 5) represents a point in 3d space.