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When more than two forces are involved, the geometry is no longer a parallelogram, but the same principles apply to a polygon of forces. The resultant force due to the application of a number of forces can be found geometrically by drawing arrows for each force. The parallelogram of forces is a graphical manifestation of the addition of vectors.
Vector diagram for addition of non-parallel forces. In general, a system of forces acting on a rigid body can always be replaced by one force plus one pure (see previous section) torque. The force is the net force, but to calculate the additional torque, the net force must be assigned the line of action.
In exterior algebra the exterior product of two vectors is a bivector. A bivector is an oriented plane element, in much the same way that a vector is an oriented line element. Given two vectors a and b, one can view the bivector a ∧ b as the oriented parallelogram spanned by a and b.
Given any two such arrows, v and w, the parallelogram spanned by these two arrows contains one diagonal arrow that starts at the origin, too. This new arrow is called the sum of the two arrows, and is denoted v + w. In the special case of two arrows on the same line, their sum is the arrow on this line whose length is the sum or the difference ...
It is common to call these tuples vectors, even in contexts where vector-space operations do not apply. More generally, when some data can be represented naturally by vectors, they are often called vectors even when addition and scalar multiplication of vectors are not valid operations on these data. [disputed – discuss] Here are some examples.
The addition of two vectors a and b. This addition method is sometimes called the parallelogram rule because a and b form the sides of a parallelogram and a + b is one of the diagonals. If a and b are bound vectors that have the same base point, this point will also be the base point of a + b.
If imagined as a parallelogram, with the origin for the vectors at 0, then signed area is the determinant of the vectors' Cartesian coordinates (a x b y − b x a y). [ 21 ] The cross product a × b is orthogonal to the bivector a ∧ b .
Vectors involved in the parallelogram law. In a normed space, the statement of the parallelogram law is an equation relating norms: ‖ ‖ + ‖ ‖ = ‖ + ‖ + ‖ ‖,.. The parallelogram law is equivalent to the seemingly weaker statement: ‖ ‖ + ‖ ‖ ‖ + ‖ + ‖ ‖, because the reverse inequality can be obtained from it by substituting (+) for , and () for , and then simplifying.