Quaternions and spatial rotation around the "z" axis, then flip it 180 degrees around the "x" axis. Take the other book, flip it 180° around "x" axis first, and 90° clockwise around "z" later. The two books do not end up parallel. This shows that, in general, the composition of two different rotations around two distinct spatial axes will not commute. The vector cross product, used to define the axis–angle representation, does confer an orientation ("handedness") to space: in a three-dimensional vector space, the three vectors in the equation will always form a right-handed set (or a left-handed set, depending on how the cross
Space (mathematics) projective geometry nor defined from the notions mentioned there. The question "what is the sum of the three angles of a triangle" is meaningful in Euclidean geometry but meaningless in projective geometry. A different situation appeared in the 19th century: in some geometries the sum of the three angles of a triangle is well-defined but different from the classical value (180 degrees). Non-Euclidean hyperbolic geometry, introduced by Nikolai Lobachevsky in 1829 and János Bolyai in 1832 (and Carl Friedrich Gauss in 1816, unpublished) stated that the sum depends on the triangle and is always less than 180 degrees. Eugenio Beltrami