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A graph of the vector-valued function r(z) = 2 cos z, 4 sin z, z indicating a range of solutions and the vector when evaluated near z = 19.5. A common example of a vector-valued function is one that depends on a single real parameter t, often representing time, producing a vector v(t) as the result.
In such a presentation, the notions of length and angle are defined by means of the dot product. The length of a vector is defined as the square root of the dot product of the vector by itself, and the cosine of the (non oriented) angle between two vectors of length one is defined as their dot product. So the equivalence of the two definitions ...
A vector field V defined on an open set S is called a gradient field or a conservative field if there exists a real-valued function (a scalar field) f on S such that = = (,,, …,). The associated flow is called the gradient flow , and is used in the method of gradient descent .
For a tensor field of order k > 1, the tensor field of order k is defined by the recursive relation = where is an arbitrary constant vector. A tensor field of order greater than one may be decomposed into a sum of outer products, and then the following identity may be used: = ().
The components of a vector are often represented arranged in a column. By contrast, a covector has components that transform like the reference axes. It lives in the dual vector space, and represents a linear map from vectors to scalars. The dot product operator involving vectors is a good example of a covector.
Mathematically, a scalar field on a region U is a real or complex-valued function or distribution on U. [1] [2] The region U may be a set in some Euclidean space, Minkowski space, or more generally a subset of a manifold, and it is typical in mathematics to impose further conditions on the field, such that it be continuous or often continuously differentiable to some order.
In vector calculus, divergence is a vector operator that operates on a vector field, producing a scalar field giving the quantity of the vector field's source at each point. More technically, the divergence represents the volume density of the outward flux of a vector field from an infinitesimal volume around a given point.
Every (real or complex) vector space admits a norm: If = is a Hamel basis for a vector space then the real-valued map that sends = (where all but finitely many of the scalars are ) to | | is a norm on . [9] There are also a large number of norms that exhibit additional properties that make them useful for specific problems.