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
Sphere Many theorems from classical geometry hold true for spherical geometry as well, but not all do because the sphere fails to satisfy some of classical geometry's postulates, including the parallel postulate. In spherical trigonometry, angles are defined between great circles. Spherical trigonometry differs from ordinary trigonometry in many respects. For example, the sum of the interior angles of a spherical triangle always exceeds 180 degrees. Also, any two similar spherical triangles are congruent. In their book "Geometry and the Imagination" David Hilbert and Stephan Cohn-Vossen describe eleven properties of the sphere and discuss whether these properties uniquely determine the sphere.