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In physics, the dot product takes two vectors and returns a scalar quantity. It is also known as the "scalar product". The dot product of two vectors can be defined as the product of the magnitudes of the two vectors and the cosine of the angle between the two vectors.
In the Cartesian plane, two vectors are said to be perpendicular if the angle between them is 90° (i.e. if they form a right angle). This definition can be formalized in Cartesian space by defining the dot product and specifying that two vectors in the plane are orthogonal if their dot product is zero.
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.
There are two lists of mathematical identities related to vectors: 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.
The dot product of two vectors can be defined as the product of the magnitudes of the two vectors and the cosine of the angle between the two vectors. Alternatively, it is defined as the product of the projection of the first vector onto the second vector and the magnitude of the second vector.
In Euclidean space, two vectors are orthogonal if and only if their dot product is zero, i.e. they make an angle of 90° (radians), or one of the vectors is zero. [4] Hence orthogonality of vectors is an extension of the concept of perpendicular vectors to spaces of any dimension.
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.
The dot product in Cartesian coordinates (Euclidean space with an orthonormal basis set) is simply the sum of the products of components. In orthogonal coordinates, the dot product of two vectors x and y takes this familiar form when the components of the vectors are calculated in the normalized basis: