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A distinction has also been made between intensive quantity and extensive quantity as two types of quantitative property, state or relation. The magnitude of an intensive quantity does not depend on the size, or extent, of the object or system of which the quantity is a property, whereas magnitudes of an extensive quantity are additive for ...
This is a list of well-known dimensionless quantities illustrating their variety of forms and applications. The tables also include pure numbers, dimensionless ratios, or dimensionless physical constants; these topics are discussed in the article.
The final column lists some special properties that some of the quantities have, such as their scaling behavior (i.e. whether the quantity is intensive or extensive), their transformation properties (i.e. whether the quantity is a scalar, vector, matrix or tensor), and whether the quantity is conserved.
An extensive property is a physical quantity whose value is proportional to the size of the system it describes, [8] or to the quantity of matter in the system. For example, the mass of a sample is an extensive quantity; it depends on the amount of substance. The related intensive quantity is the density which is independent of the amount.
A quantity of dimension one is historically known as a dimensionless quantity (a term that is still commonly used); all its dimensional exponents are zero and its dimension symbol is . Such a quantity can be regarded as a derived quantity in the form of the ratio of two quantities of the same dimension.
A physical quantity (or simply quantity) [1] [a] is a property of a material or system that can be quantified by measurement. A physical quantity can be expressed as a value , which is the algebraic multiplication of a numerical value and a unit of measurement .
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.
Position, when thought of as a displacement from an origin point, is a vector: a quantity with both magnitude and direction. [9]: 1 Velocity and acceleration are vector quantities as well. The mathematical tools of vector algebra provide the means to describe motion in two, three or more dimensions.