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A free vector is a vector quantity having an undefined support or region of application; it can be freely translated with no consequences; a displacement vector is a prototypical example of free vector. Aside from the notion of units and support, physical vector quantities may also differ from Euclidean vectors in terms of metric.
A free vector is a vector quantity having an undefined support or region of application; it can be freely translated with no consequences; a displacement vector is a prototypical example of free vector. Aside from the notion of units and support, physical vector quantities may also differ from Euclidean vectors in terms of metric.
A vector pointing from point A to point B. In mathematics, physics, and engineering, a Euclidean vector or simply a vector (sometimes called a geometric vector [1] or spatial vector [2]) is a geometric object that has magnitude (or length) and direction.
The definition of a "vector" in physics (including both polar vectors and pseudovectors) is more specific than the mathematical definition of "vector" (namely, any element of an abstract vector space). Under the physics definition, a "vector" is required to have components that "transform" in a certain way under a proper rotation: In particular ...
When the scalar field is the real numbers, the vector space is called a real vector space, and when the scalar field is the complex numbers, the vector space is called a complex vector space. [4] These two cases are the most common ones, but vector spaces with scalars in an arbitrary field F are also commonly considered.
[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 ...
The vector projection (also known as the vector component or vector resolution) of a vector a on (or onto) a nonzero vector b is the orthogonal projection of a onto a straight line parallel to b. The projection of a onto b is often written as proj b a {\displaystyle \operatorname {proj} _{\mathbf {b} }\mathbf {a} } or a ∥ b .
A four-vector A is a vector with a "timelike" component and three "spacelike" components, and can be written in various equivalent notations: [3] = (,,,) = + + + = + = where A α is the magnitude component and E α is the basis vector component; note that both are necessary to make a vector, and that when A α is seen alone, it refers strictly to the components of the vector.