Word.ws English Dictionary

homothety

homothety noun: an isotropic scaling transformation of an affine space with a single fixed point.

homothety: an isotropic scaling transformation of an affine space with a single fixed point
Image: Krzysztof Blachnicki, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

homothety (plural homotheties)

  1. An isotropic scaling transformation of an affine space with a single fixed point.
    • The product of two homotheties with the same centre is a homothety with that centre.1927, Henry George Forder, The Foundations of Euclidean Geometry, page 178
    • One cannot obtain all similarity mappings from products of homotheties alone, but they are necessary and basic to similarities.1972, Clayton W. Dodge, Euclidean Geometry and Transformations, published 2004, page 106
    Synonyms:
    homothecy, homogeneous dilation, homothetic transformation
  2. (commutative algebra) A homomorphism from a module M over a ring A to itself of the form ν:x↦ax for some fixed a∈A (especially when M=A; a is said to be the ratio of the homothety, by analogy with the geometric case).

Synonyms of homothety

Forms of homothety

pluralhomotheties

Origin of homothety

From Ancient Greek ὁμο- (homo-, “same”) + θέσις (thésis, “setting, placement, arrangement”).

Words formed from homothety

Questions about homothety

What does homothety mean?
Homothety means an isotropic scaling transformation of an affine space with a single fixed point.
What part of speech is homothety?
Homothety is a noun.
What is the plural of homothety?
The plural of homothety is homotheties.

Words near homothety in the dictionary

  1. homothetically
  2. homotheticities
  3. homotheticity
  4. homotheties
  5. homothets
  6. homothety
  7. homothorax
  8. homothymine
  9. homotolerance
  10. homotonic
  11. homotonies

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: homothety (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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