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An equivalent definition of a vector space can be given, which is much more concise but less elementary: the first four axioms (related to vector addition) say that a vector space is an abelian group under addition, and the four remaining axioms (related to the scalar multiplication) say that this operation defines a ring homomorphism from the ...
A scalar is an element of a field which is used to define a vector space.In linear algebra, real numbers or generally elements of a field are called scalars and relate to vectors in an associated vector space through the operation of scalar multiplication (defined in the vector space), in which a vector can be multiplied by a scalar in the defined way to produce another vector.
A scalar in physics and other areas of science is also a scalar in mathematics, as an element of a mathematical field used to define a vector space.For example, the magnitude (or length) of an electric field vector is calculated as the square root of its absolute square (the inner product of the electric field with itself); so, the inner product's result is an element of the mathematical field ...
Both vector addition and scalar multiplication are trivial. A basis for this vector space is the empty set, so that {0} is the 0-dimensional vector space over F. Every vector space over F contains a subspace isomorphic to this one. The zero vector space is conceptually different from the null space of a linear operator L, which is the kernel of L.
In mathematics, an inner product space (or, rarely, a Hausdorff pre-Hilbert space [1] [2]) is a real vector space or a complex vector space with an operation called an inner product. The inner product of two vectors in the space is a scalar , often denoted with angle brackets such as in a , b {\displaystyle \langle a,b\rangle } .
Vector addition and scalar multiplication: a vector v (blue) is added to another vector w (red, upper illustration). Below, w is stretched by a factor of 2, yielding the sum v + 2w . In mathematics and physics , a vector space (also called a linear space) is a set whose elements, often called vectors , can be added together and multiplied ...
In a vector space, the set of scalars is a field and acts on the vectors by scalar multiplication, subject to certain axioms such as the distributive law. In a module, the scalars need only be a ring , so the module concept represents a significant generalization.
The definition of many normed spaces (in particular, Banach spaces) involves a seminorm defined on a vector space and then the normed space is defined as the quotient space by the subspace of elements of seminorm zero.