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If the dot product of two vectors is defined—a scalar-valued product of two vectors—then it is also possible to define a length; the dot product gives a convenient algebraic characterization of both angle (a function of the dot product between any two non-zero vectors) and length (the square root of the dot product of a vector by itself).
The most basic example is the flat Euclidean plane, an idealization of a flat surface in physical space such as a sheet of paper or a chalkboard. On the Euclidean plane, any two points can be joined by a unique straight line along which the distance can be measured.
In mathematics and physics, vector notation is a commonly used notation for representing vectors, [1] [2] which may be Euclidean vectors, or more generally, members of a vector space. For denoting a vector, the common typographic convention is lower case, upright boldface type, as in v .
In the natural sciences, a vector quantity (also known as a vector physical quantity, physical vector, or simply vector) is a vector-valued physical quantity. [9] [10] It is typically formulated as the product of a unit of measurement and a vector numerical value (), often a Euclidean vector with magnitude and direction.
The selection of an origin and a basis define a unit cell, a parallelotope (i.e., generalization of a parallelogram (2D) or parallelepiped (3D) in higher dimensions) defined by the lattice basis vectors ,, …, where is the dimension of the space.
State vectors are defined with respect to some frame of reference, usually but not always an inertial reference frame. One of the more popular reference frames for the state vectors of bodies moving near Earth is the Earth-centered inertial (ECI) system defined as follows: [1]: 23 The origin is Earth's center of mass;
Cartesian coordinates identify points of the Euclidean plane with pairs of real numbers. In mathematics, the real coordinate space or real coordinate n-space, of dimension n, denoted R n or , is the set of all ordered n-tuples of real numbers, that is the set of all sequences of n real numbers, also known as coordinate vectors.
A Euclidean plane with a chosen Cartesian coordinate system is called a Cartesian plane. The set R 2 {\displaystyle \mathbb {R} ^{2}} of the ordered pairs of real numbers (the real coordinate plane ), equipped with the dot product , is often called the Euclidean plane or standard Euclidean plane , since every Euclidean plane is isomorphic to it.