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Illustration of tangential and normal components of a vector to a surface. In mathematics, given a vector at a point on a curve, that vector can be decomposed uniquely as a sum of two vectors, one tangent to the curve, called the tangential component of the vector, and another one perpendicular to the curve, called the normal component of the vector.
Minkowski sums act linearly on the perimeter of two-dimensional convex bodies: the perimeter of the sum equals the sum of perimeters. Additionally, if K {\textstyle K} is (the interior of) a curve of constant width , then the Minkowski sum of K {\textstyle K} and of its 180° rotation is a disk.
Algebraically, the dot product is the sum of the products of the corresponding entries of the two sequences of numbers. Geometrically, it is the product of the Euclidean magnitudes of the two vectors and the cosine of the angle between them. These definitions are equivalent when using Cartesian coordinates.
When a non-scalar quaternion is viewed as the quotient of two vectors, then the axis of the quaternion is a unit vector perpendicular to the plane of the two vectors in this original quotient, in a direction specified by the right hand rule. [59] The angle is the angle between the two vectors. In symbols, =.
A two-vector or bivector [1] is a tensor of type () and it is the dual of a two-form, meaning that it is a linear functional which maps two-forms to the real numbers (or more generally, to scalars). The tensor product of a pair of vectors is a two-vector. Then, any two-form can be expressed as a linear combination of tensor products of pairs of ...
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.
The cross product of two vectors in dimensions with positive-definite quadratic form is closely related to their exterior product. Most instances of geometric algebras of interest have a nondegenerate quadratic form. If the quadratic form is fully degenerate, the inner product of any two vectors is always zero, and the geometric algebra is then ...
(For example, for a position vector of length meters, if all Cartesian basis vectors are changed from meters in length to meters in length, the length of the position vector remains unchanged at meters, although the vector components will all increase by a factor of ). The scalar product of a vector and a covector is invariant, because one has ...