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In mathematics, a unit vector in a normed vector space is a vector (often a spatial vector) of length 1. A unit vector is often denoted by a lowercase letter with a circumflex, or "hat", as in ^ (pronounced "v-hat"). The term normalized vector is sometimes used as a synonym for unit vector. The normalized vector û of a non-zero vector u is the ...
More generally, for a function of n variables (, …,), also called a scalar field, the gradient is the vector field: = (, …,) = + + where (=,,...,) are mutually orthogonal unit vectors. As the name implies, the gradient is proportional to, and points in the direction of, the function's most rapid (positive) change.
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 ...
A vector field V defined on an open set S is called a gradient field or a conservative field if there exists a real-valued function (a scalar field) f on S such that = = (,,, …,). The associated flow is called the gradient flow , and is used in the method of gradient descent .
Vector algebra relations — regarding operations on individual vectors such as dot product, cross product, etc. Vector calculus identities — regarding operations on vector fields such as divergence, gradient, curl, etc.
A unit vector is any vector with a length of one; normally unit vectors are used simply to indicate direction. A vector of arbitrary length can be divided by its length to create a unit vector. [14] This is known as normalizing a vector. A unit vector is often indicated with a hat as in â.
In Cartesian space, the norm of a vector is the square root of the vector dotted with itself. That is, ‖ ‖ = Many important results in linear algebra deal with collections of two or more orthogonal vectors. But often, it is easier to deal with vectors of unit length. That is, it often simplifies things to only consider vectors whose norm ...
The simplest example of a vector space over a field F is the field F itself with its addition viewed as vector addition and its multiplication viewed as scalar multiplication. More generally, all n -tuples (sequences of length n ) ( a 1 , a 2 , … , a n ) {\displaystyle (a_{1},a_{2},\dots ,a_{n})} of elements a i of F form a vector space that ...