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The cross product with respect to a right-handed coordinate system. In mathematics, the cross product or vector product (occasionally directed area product, to emphasize its geometric significance) is a binary operation on two vectors in a three-dimensional oriented Euclidean vector space (named here ), and is denoted by the symbol .
In mathematics, the dot product or scalar product [note 1] is an algebraic operation that takes two equal-length sequences of numbers (usually coordinate vectors), and returns a single number. In Euclidean geometry , the dot product of the Cartesian coordinates of two vectors is widely used.
In the Cartesian plane, two vectors are said to be perpendicular if the angle between them is 90° (i.e. if they form a right angle). This definition can be formalized in Cartesian space by defining the dot product and specifying that two vectors in the plane are orthogonal if their dot product is zero.
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 u and v would be represented as: By some conventions (e.g. in France and in some areas of higher mathematics), this is also denoted by a wedge, [ 12 ] which avoids confusion with the wedge product since the two are functionally equivalent in three dimensions: u ∧ v {\displaystyle \mathbf {u} \wedge \mathbf {v} }
The Cartesian square of a set X is the Cartesian product X 2 = X × X. An example is the 2-dimensional plane R 2 = R × R where R is the set of real numbers: [1] R 2 is the set of all points (x,y) where x and y are real numbers (see the Cartesian coordinate system).
In Euclidean 3-space, the wedge product has the same magnitude as the cross product (the area of the parallelogram formed by sides and ) but generalizes to arbitrary affine spaces and products between more than two vectors. Tensor product – for two vectors and , where and are vector spaces, their tensor product belongs to the tensor product ...
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 ...