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In the natural sciences, a vector quantity (also known as a vector physical quantity, physical vector, or simply vector) is a vector-valued physical quantity. [9] [10] It is typically formulated as the product of a unit of measurement and a vector numerical value (), often a Euclidean vector with magnitude and direction.
Alternatively, -vectors are called pseudoscalars, -vectors are called pseudovectors, etc. Many of the elements of the algebra are not graded by this scheme since they are sums of elements of differing grade. Such elements are said to be of mixed grade. The grading of multivectors is independent of the basis chosen originally.
Vectors are defined in cylindrical coordinates by (ρ, φ, z), where ρ is the length of the vector projected onto the xy-plane, φ is the angle between the projection of the vector onto the xy-plane (i.e. ρ) and the positive x-axis (0 ≤ φ < 2π), z is the regular z-coordinate. (ρ, φ, z) is given in Cartesian coordinates by:
The fundamental difference is that GA provides a new product of vectors called the "geometric product". Elements of GA are graded multivectors: scalars are grade 0, usual vectors are grade 1, bivectors are grade 2 and the highest grade (3 in the 3D case) is traditionally called the pseudoscalar and designated .
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.
Since the notions of vector length and angle between vectors can be generalized to any n-dimensional inner product space, this is also true for the notions of orthogonal projection of a vector, projection of a vector onto another, and rejection of a vector from another. In some cases, the inner product coincides with the dot product.
A set of vectors is linearly independent if none is in the span of the others. Equivalently, a set S of vectors is linearly independent if the only way to express the zero vector as a linear combination of elements of S is to take zero for every coefficient a i. A set of vectors that spans a vector space is called a spanning set or generating set.
In this article, vectors are represented in boldface to distinguish them from scalars. [nb 1] [1] A vector space over a field F is a non-empty set V together with a binary operation and a binary function that satisfy the eight axioms listed below. In this context, the elements of V are commonly called vectors, and the elements of F are called ...