| Implicit surfaces | 
A general implicit surface is defined as the solution set of one equation:
 
      
        where  is a subdomain of
 is a subdomain of  .
        Usually
.
        Usually  is continous and enough differentiable
        so
 is continous and enough differentiable
        so 
      
        An algebraic surface is a special case of an implicit surface where
         is a polynomial with coefficients in
 is a polynomial with coefficients in  .
.
      
Here is an example of a surface defined by the equation:
 
      which is known as the Whitney umbrella.