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In geometry and algebra, the triple product is a product of three 3-dimensional vectors, usually Euclidean vectors.The name "triple product" is used for two different products, the scalar-valued scalar triple product and, less often, the vector-valued vector triple product.
The scalar triple product of three vectors is defined as = = (). Its value is the determinant of the matrix whose columns are the Cartesian coordinates of the three vectors. It is the signed volume of the parallelepiped defined by the three vectors, and is isomorphic to the three-dimensional special case of the exterior product of three vectors.
In Cartesian coordinates, the divergence of a continuously differentiable vector field = + + is the scalar-valued function: = = (, , ) (, , ) = + +.. As the name implies, the divergence is a (local) measure of the degree to which vectors in the field diverge.
The following are important identities in vector algebra.Identities that only involve the magnitude of a vector ‖ ‖ and the dot product (scalar product) of two vectors A·B, apply to vectors in any dimension, while identities that use the cross product (vector product) A×B only apply in three dimensions, since the cross product is only defined there.
The scalar triple product (also called the box product or mixed triple product) is not really a new operator, but a way of applying the other two multiplication operators to three vectors. The scalar triple product is sometimes denoted by (a b c) and defined as:
The scalar coefficient is the triple product of the three vectors. The cross product and triple product in three dimensions each admit both geometric and algebraic interpretations. The cross product u × v can be interpreted as a vector which is perpendicular to both u and v and whose magnitude is equal to the area of the parallelogram ...
A pseudoscalar also results from any scalar product between a pseudovector and an ordinary vector. The prototypical example of a pseudoscalar is the scalar triple product, which can be written as the scalar product between one of the vectors in the triple product and the cross product between the two other vectors, where the latter is a ...
The torque or curl is then a normal vector field in this 3rd dimension. By contrast, geometric algebra in 2 dimensions defines these as a pseudoscalar field (a bivector), without requiring a 3rd dimension. Similarly, the scalar triple product is ad hoc, and can instead be expressed uniformly using the exterior product and the geometric product.