Related to questions about transformations in homogeneous coordinates.
In linear algebra, linear transformations can be represented by matrices.
Linear transformations are not the only ones that can be represented by matrices. Some transformations that are non-linear on a n-dimensional Euclidean space, can be represented as linear transformations on the n+1-dimensional space. These include both affine transformations (such as translation) and projective transformations.
Homogeneous coordinates are ubiquitous in computer graphics because they allow common operations such as translation, rotation, scaling and perspective projection to be implemented as matrix operations.