Simultaneously, numbers began to displace geometry as the foundation of mathematics. For instance, in Richard Dedekind's 1872 essay "Stetigkeit und irrationale Zahlen" ("Continuity and irrational numbers"), he asserts that points on a line ought to have the properties of Dedekind cuts, and that therefore a line was the same thing as the set of real numbers. Dedekind is careful to note that this is an assumption that is incapable of being proven. In modern treatments, Dedekind's assertion is often taken to be the definition of a line, thereby reducing geometry to arithmetic. Three-dimensional Euclidean space is defined to be an affine space whose associated vector space of differences of its elements is equipped with an inner product. A definition "from scratch", as in Euclid, is now not often used, since it does not reveal the relation of this space to other spaces. Also, a three-dimensional projective space is now defined as the space of all one-dimensional subspaces (that is, straight lines through the origin) of a four-dimensional vector space. This shift in foundations requires a new set of axioms, and if these axioms are adopted, the classical axioms of geometry become theorems.