Harold Baize wrote:

> They aren't the initials of any particular words.
> My guess is that they were just taken from the alphabet.
> They describe coordinates in a curved 2D space.
> The letters were chosen by moving from z toward a.
> Since x, y and z have been used, for the standard 3D
> coordinates, someone decided upon u and v. Don't know
> what dimension w is used for...
>
> z,y,x,(w),u,v,

Vectors in computer graphics are often represented with 4 coordinates -
w, x, y, and z.  This allows you to have a 4x4 transformation matrix
that can not only rotate and scale the coordinates but also perform
translations and perspective projections.  The resulting 4D vector
[w,x,y,z] must be transformed into the 3D vector [x/w, y/w, z/w].  All
this to say that the 'w' was reserved.

David  Buck
dav### [at] simberoncom

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