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Illustration showing how to find the angle between vectors using the dot product Calculating bond angles of a symmetrical tetrahedral molecular geometry using a dot product. In Euclidean space, a Euclidean vector is a geometric object that possesses both a magnitude and a direction. A vector can be pictured as an arrow.
If vectors u and v have direction cosines (α u, β u, γ u) and (α v, β v, γ v) respectively, with an angle θ between them, their units vectors are ^ = + + (+ +) = + + ^ = + + (+ +) = + +. Taking the dot product of these two unit vectors yield, ^ ^ = + + = , where θ is the angle between the two unit vectors, and is also the angle between u and v.
The dot product of two unit vectors behaves just oppositely: it is zero when the unit vectors are perpendicular and 1 if the unit vectors are parallel. Unit vectors enable two convenient identities: the dot product of two unit vectors yields the cosine (which may be positive or negative) of the angle between the two unit vectors.
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.
Equals subtracted from equals are equal. When two adjacent angles form a straight line, they are supplementary. Therefore, if we assume that the measure of angle A equals x, the measure of angle C would be 180° − x. Similarly, the measure of angle D would be 180° − x. Both angle C and angle D have measures equal to 180° − x and are ...
Another case is when two sides and the angle between them are known and the rest are unknown. We multiply one of the sides by the sine of the [known] angle one time and by the sine of its complement the other time converted and we subtract the second result from the other side if the angle is acute and add it if the angle is obtuse.
The normalized angle, referred to as angular distance, between any two vectors and is a formal distance metric and can be calculated from the cosine similarity. [5] The complement of the angular distance metric can then be used to define angular similarity function bounded between 0 and 1, inclusive.
By extension, this can be used to transform all three basis vectors to compute a rotation matrix in SO(3), the group of all rotation matrices, from an axis–angle representation. In terms of Lie theory, the Rodrigues' formula provides an algorithm to compute the exponential map from the Lie algebra so (3) to its Lie group SO(3) .