Consider a quadruple of four pairwise distinct lines through the origin in the -plane. Two such quadruples and are said to be isomorphic if there exists an invertible matrix such that for . How many isomorphism classes of such quadruples are there?
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For any real number k other than 0 or 1, define the quadruple Q k = ( y = 0 , x = 0 , y = x , y = k x ) . If A defines an isomorphism from Q k to Q k ′ , then A must be a scalar multiple of I 2 since L 1 , L 2 and L 3 are invariant under A . Thus L 4 is invariant under A as well. We can conclude that Q k is isomorphic to Q k ′ only if k = k ′ , showing that there are infinitely many isomorphism classes of quadruples (and in fact overcountably many).