Bravais lattice
In geometry and crystallography, a Bravais lattice, named after Auguste Bravais (1850), is an infinite array of discrete points generated by a set of discrete translation operations described in three dimensional space by R = n 1 a 1 + n 2 a 2 + n 3 a 3 , {\displaystyle \mathbf {R} =n_{1}\mathbf {a} _{1}+n_{2}\mathbf {a} _{2}+n_{3}\mathbf {a} _{3},} where the ni are any integers, and ai are primitive translation vectors, or primitive vectors, which lie in different directions (not necessarily mutually perpendicular) and span the lattice. The choice of primitive vectors for a given Bravais lattice is not unique.