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A scalar in physics and other areas of science is also a scalar in mathematics, as an element of a mathematical field used to define a vector space.For example, the magnitude (or length) of an electric field vector is calculated as the square root of its absolute square (the inner product of the electric field with itself); so, the inner product's result is an element of the mathematical field ...
A scalar is an element of a field which is used to define a vector space.In linear algebra, real numbers or generally elements of a field are called scalars and relate to vectors in an associated vector space through the operation of scalar multiplication (defined in the vector space), in which a vector can be multiplied by a scalar in the defined way to produce another vector.
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.
Addition and scalar multiplication are given as in finite coordinate space. The dimensionality of F ∞ is countably infinite. A standard basis consists of the vectors e i which contain a 1 in the i-th slot and zeros elsewhere. This vector space is the coproduct (or direct sum) of countably many copies of the vector space F.
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 ...
The final column lists some special properties that some of the quantities have, such as their scaling behavior (i.e. whether the quantity is intensive or extensive), their transformation properties (i.e. whether the quantity is a scalar, vector, matrix or tensor), and whether the quantity is conserved.
Mathematically, a scalar field on a region U is a real or complex-valued function or distribution on U. [1] [2] The region U may be a set in some Euclidean space, Minkowski space, or more generally a subset of a manifold, and it is typical in mathematics to impose further conditions on the field, such that it be continuous or often continuously differentiable to some order.
Using the algebraic properties of subtraction and division, along with scalar multiplication, it is also possible to “subtract” two vectors and “divide” a vector by a scalar. Vector subtraction is performed by adding the scalar multiple of −1 with the second vector operand to the first vector operand. This can be represented by the ...