## Equation of a plane through three points

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We are given three points, and we seek the equation of the plane that goes through them. The method is straight forward. A plane is defined by the equation:

$$a x + b y + c z = d$$

and we just need the coefficients. The $$a, b, c$$ coefficients are obtained from a vector normal to the plane, and $$d$$ is calculated separately. We get the normal vector from the cross-product of two vectors connecting the points, and we get $$d$$ from the dot product of the normal vector with any one of the point position vectors.

Finally, given the equation, we want to generate a mesh that samples the plane, and plot the mesh and original points to verify the plane goes through the points. Here is the implementation.

import numpy as np

p1 = np.array([1, 2, 3])
p2 = np.array([4, 6, 9])
p3 = np.array([12, 11, 9])

# These two vectors are in the plane
v1 = p3 - p1
v2 = p2 - p1

# the cross product is a vector normal to the plane
cp = np.cross(v1, v2)
a, b, c = cp

# This evaluates a * x3 + b * y3 + c * z3 which equals d
d = np.dot(cp, p3)

print('The equation is {0}x + {1}y + {2}z = {3}'.format(a, b, c, d))

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from mpl_toolkits.mplot3d import Axes3D
fig = plt.figure()

x = np.linspace(-2, 14, 5)
y = np.linspace(-2, 14, 5)
X, Y = np.meshgrid(x, y)

Z = (d - a * X - b * Y) / c

# plot the mesh. Each array is 2D, so we flatten them to 1D arrays
ax.plot(X.flatten(),
Y.flatten(),
Z.flatten(), 'bo ')

# plot the original points. We use zip to get 1D lists of x, y and z
# coordinates.
ax.plot(*zip(p1, p2, p3), color='r', linestyle=' ', marker='o')

# adjust the view so we can see the point/plane alignment
ax.view_init(0, 22)
plt.tight_layout()
plt.savefig('images/plane.png')
plt.show()

The equation is 30x + -48y + 17z = -15


It looks like the blue points form a plane that contains the red points.