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Illustration showing how to find the angle between vectors using the dot product Calculating bond angles of a symmetrical tetrahedral molecular geometry using a dot product. In Euclidean space, a Euclidean vector is a geometric object that possesses both a magnitude and a direction. A vector can be pictured as an arrow.
If vectors u and v have direction cosines (α u, β u, γ u) and (α v, β v, γ v) respectively, with an angle θ between them, their units vectors are ^ = + + (+ +) = + + ^ = + + (+ +) = + +. Taking the dot product of these two unit vectors yield, ^ ^ = + + = , where θ is the angle between the two unit vectors, and is also the angle between u and v.
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.
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 angle between two term frequency vectors cannot be greater than 90°. If the attribute vectors are normalized by subtracting the vector means (e.g., ¯), the measure is called the centered cosine similarity and is equivalent to the Pearson correlation coefficient. For an example of centering,
A metric tensor at p is a function g p (X p, Y p) which takes as inputs a pair of tangent vectors X p and Y p at p, and produces as an output a real number , so that the following conditions are satisfied: g p is bilinear. A function of two vector arguments is bilinear if it is linear separately in each argument.
The angle between two planes (such as two adjacent faces of a polyhedron) is called a dihedral angle. [18] It may be defined as the acute angle between two lines normal to the planes. The angle between a plane and an intersecting straight line is complementary to the angle between the intersecting line and the normal to the plane.
Since the notions of vector length and angle between vectors can be generalized to any n-dimensional inner product space, this is also true for the notions of orthogonal projection of a vector, projection of a vector onto another, and rejection of a vector from another. In some cases, the inner product coincides with the dot product.