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Three line segments with the same direction. In geometry, direction, also known as spatial direction or vector direction, is the common characteristic of all rays which coincide when translated to share a common endpoint; equivalently, it is the common characteristic of vectors (such as the relative position between a pair of points) which can be made equal by scaling (by some positive scalar ...
Ordinary vectors are sometimes called true vectors or polar vectors to distinguish them from pseudovectors. Pseudovectors occur most frequently as the cross product of two ordinary vectors. One example of a pseudovector is angular velocity. Driving in a car, and looking forward, each of the wheels has an angular velocity vector pointing to the ...
It is common to call these tuples vectors, even in contexts where vector-space operations do not apply. More generally, when some data can be represented naturally by vectors, they are often called vectors even when addition and scalar multiplication of vectors are not valid operations on these data. [disputed – discuss] Here are some examples.
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 .
The angle θ and axis unit vector e define a rotation, concisely represented by the rotation vector θe.. In mathematics, the axis–angle representation parameterizes a rotation in a three-dimensional Euclidean space by two quantities: a unit vector e indicating the direction of an axis of rotation, and an angle of rotation θ describing the magnitude and sense (e.g., clockwise) of the ...
Given a subset S of R n, a vector field is represented by a vector-valued function V: S → R n in standard Cartesian coordinates (x 1, …, x n).If each component of V is continuous, then V is a continuous vector field.
Aside from the notion of units and support, physical vector quantities may also differ from Euclidean vectors in terms of metric. For example, an event in spacetime may be represented as a position four-vector, with coherent derived unit of meters: it includes a position Euclidean vector and a timelike component, t ⋅ c 0 (involving the speed ...
As a tensor is a generalization of a scalar (a pure number representing a value, for example speed) and a vector (a magnitude and a direction, like velocity), a tensor field is a generalization of a scalar field and a vector field that assigns, respectively, a scalar or vector to each point of space.