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Illustration of tangential and normal components of a vector to a surface. In mathematics, given a vector at a point on a curve, that vector can be decomposed uniquely as a sum of two vectors, one tangent to the curve, called the tangential component of the vector, and another one perpendicular to the curve, called the normal component of the vector.
Typically, these components are the projections of the vector on a set of mutually perpendicular reference axes (basis vectors). The vector is said to be decomposed or resolved with respect to that set. Illustration of tangential and normal components of a vector to a surface. The decomposition or resolution [16] of a vector into components is ...
Note: This page uses common physics notation for spherical coordinates, in which is the angle between the z axis and the radius vector connecting the origin to the point in question, while is the angle between the projection of the radius vector onto the x-y plane and the x axis. Several other definitions are in use, and so care must be taken ...
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 vector's components change scale inversely to changes in scale to the reference axes, and consequently a vector is called a contravariant tensor. A vector, which is an example of a contravariant tensor, has components that transform inversely to the transformation of the reference axes, (with example transformations including rotation and ...
The coefficients of this linear combination are referred to as components or coordinates of the vector with respect to B. The elements of a basis are called basis vectors . Equivalently, a set B is a basis if its elements are linearly independent and every element of V is a linear combination of elements of B . [ 1 ]
The term scalar component refers sometimes to scalar projection, as, in Cartesian coordinates, the components of a vector are the scalar projections in the directions of the coordinate axes.
A vector in can also be specified as a row or column matrix containing the ordered set of components. A vector specified as a row matrix is known as a row vector; one specified as a column matrix is known as a column vector.