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Vectors can also be specified using simplified autonomous equations that define r and θ explicitly. This can be unwieldy, but is useful for avoiding the confusion with two-dimensional rectangular vectors that arises from using ordered pair or matrix notation.
If the dot product of two vectors is defined—a scalar-valued product of two vectors—then it is also possible to define a length; the dot product gives a convenient algebraic characterization of both angle (a function of the dot product between any two non-zero vectors) and length (the square root of the dot product of a vector by itself).
The equation of a circle is (x − a) 2 + (y − b) 2 = r 2 where a and b are the coordinates of the center (a, b) and r is the radius. Cartesian coordinates are named for René Descartes, whose invention of them in the 17th century revolutionized mathematics by allowing the expression of problems of geometry in terms of algebra and calculus.
Vectors are defined in cylindrical coordinates by (ρ, φ, z), where ρ is the length of the vector projected onto the xy-plane, φ is the angle between the projection of the vector onto the xy-plane (i.e. ρ) and the positive x-axis (0 ≤ φ < 2π), z is the regular z-coordinate. (ρ, φ, z) is given in Cartesian coordinates by:
Tangent plane element: If x(λ 1, λ 2) parametrizes a surface S in Cartesian coordinates, then the following cross product of tangent vectors is a normal vector to S with the magnitude of infinitesimal plane element, in curvilinear coordinates. Using the above result,
Unit vectors may be used to represent the axes of a Cartesian coordinate system.For instance, the standard unit vectors in the direction of the x, y, and z axes of a three dimensional Cartesian coordinate system are
Cartesian coordinates identify points of the Euclidean plane with pairs of real numbers. In mathematics, the real coordinate space or real coordinate n-space, of dimension n, denoted R n or , is the set of all ordered n-tuples of real numbers, that is the set of all sequences of n real numbers, also known as coordinate vectors.
In linear algebra, a coordinate vector is a representation of a vector as an ordered list of numbers (a tuple) that describes the vector in terms of a particular ordered basis. [1]