ternary plot

Article summary

, showing which mixtures of methane, oxygen gas, and inert nitrogen gas will burn A ternary plot, ternary graph, triangle plot, simplex plot, or Gibbs triangle is a barycentric plot on three variables which sum to a constant. It graphically depicts the ratios of the three variables as positions in an equilateral triangle. It is used in physical chemistry, petrology, mineralogy, metallurgy, and other physical sciences to show the compositions of systems composed of three species. Ternary plots are tools for analyzing compositional data in the three-dimensional case. In population genetics, a triangle plot of genotype frequencies is called a de Finetti diagram. In game theory and convex optimization, it is often called a simplex plot. In a ternary plot, the values of the three variables , , and must sum to some constant, . Usually, this constant is represented as 1.0 or 100%. Because for all substances being graphed, any one variable is not independent of the others, so only two variables must be known to find a sample's point on the graph: for instance, must be equal to . Because the three numerical values cannot vary independently—there are only two degrees of freedom—it is possible to graph the combinations of all three variables in only two dimensions.…

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