At a deeper level, perpendicular projection onto a subspace (the analog of "dropping the altitude" of a triangle) plays a significant role in optimization problems and other aspects of the theory. An element of a Hilbert space can be uniquely specified by its coordinates with respect to a set of coordinate axes (an orthonormal basis), in analogy with Cartesian coordinates in the plane. When that set of axes is countably infinite, the Hilbert space can also be usefully thought of in terms of the space of infinite sequences that are square-summable.