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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 ("scaled") by numbers called scalars. The operations of vector addition and scalar multiplication must satisfy certain requirements, called vector axioms .
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 ...
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.
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 ...
Addition and scalar multiplication are given as in finite coordinate space. The dimensionality of F ∞ is countably infinite. A standard basis consists of the vectors e i which contain a 1 in the i-th slot and zeros elsewhere. This vector space is the coproduct (or direct sum) of countably many copies of the vector space F.
The term vector was coined by W. R. Hamilton around 1843, as he revealed quaternions, a system which uses vectors and scalars to span a four-dimensional space. For a quaternion q = a + b i + c j + d k, Hamilton used two projections: S q = a , for the scalar part of q , and V q = b i + c j + d k, the vector part.
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The operations of vector addition and scalar multiplication of a vector space; The algebraic operations in vector calculus (vector analysis) – including the dot and cross products of 3-dimensional Euclidean space; Algebra over a field – a vector space equipped with a bilinear product