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In the natural sciences, a vector quantity (also known as a vector physical quantity, physical vector, or simply vector) is a vector-valued physical quantity. [9] [10] It is typically formulated as the product of a unit of measurement and a vector numerical value (), often a Euclidean vector with magnitude and direction.
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.
In mathematics and physics, vector notation is a commonly used notation for representing vectors, [1] [2] which may be Euclidean vectors, or more generally, members of a vector space. For denoting a vector, the common typographic convention is lower case, upright boldface type, as in v .
Vectors also describe many other physical quantities, such as linear displacement, displacement, linear acceleration, angular acceleration, linear momentum, and angular momentum. Other physical vectors, such as the electric and magnetic field, are represented as a system of vectors at each point of a physical space; that is, a vector field ...
A space curve; the vectors T, N, B; and the osculating plane spanned by T and N. In differential geometry, the Frenet–Serret formulas describe the kinematic properties of a particle moving along a differentiable curve in three-dimensional Euclidean space, or the geometric properties of the curve itself irrespective of any motion.
The cross product with respect to a right-handed coordinate system. In mathematics, the cross product or vector product (occasionally directed area product, to emphasize its geometric significance) is a binary operation on two vectors in a three-dimensional oriented Euclidean vector space (named here ), and is denoted by the symbol .
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.
The above formulas for the derivative of a vector function rely on the assumption that the basis vectors e 1, e 2, e 3 are constant, that is, fixed in the reference frame in which the derivative of a is being taken, and therefore the e 1, e 2, e 3 each has a derivative of identically zero.