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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 ...
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.
[1] [2] [3] An example of a scalar field is a weather map, with the surface temperature described by assigning a number to each point on the map. A surface wind map, [4] assigning an arrow to each point on a map that describes the wind speed and direction at that point, is an example of a vector field, i.e. a 1-dimensional (rank-1) tensor field ...
Others [5] [6] define weight as a scalar quantity, the magnitude of the gravitational force. Yet others [ 7 ] define it as the magnitude of the reaction force exerted on a body by mechanisms that counteract the effects of gravity: the weight is the quantity that is measured by, for example, a spring scale.
The final column lists some special properties that some of the quantities have, such as their scaling behavior (i.e. whether the quantity is intensive or extensive), their transformation properties (i.e. whether the quantity is a scalar, vector, matrix or tensor), and whether the quantity is conserved.
Scalar (mathematics), an element of a field, which is used to define a vector space, usually the field of real numbers; Scalar (physics), a physical quantity that can be described by a single element of a number field such as a real number Lorentz scalar, a quantity in the theory of relativity which is invariant under a Lorentz transformation
A physical quantity can be expressed as a value, which is the algebraic multiplication of a numerical value and a unit of measurement. For example, the physical quantity mass, symbol m, can be quantified as m=n kg, where n is the numerical value and kg is the unit symbol (for kilogram). Quantities that are vectors have, besides numerical value ...
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.