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Historically, vectors were introduced in geometry and physics (typically in mechanics) for quantities that have both a magnitude and a direction, such as displacements, forces and velocity. Such quantities are represented by geometric vectors in the same way as distances , masses and time are represented by real numbers .
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 ...
In physics, Euclidean vectors are used to represent physical quantities that have both magnitude and direction, but are not located at a specific place, in contrast to scalars, which have no direction. [7] For example, velocity, forces and acceleration are represented by vectors.
The term vector was coined by W. R. Hamilton around 1843, as he revealed quaternions, a system which uses vectors and scalars to span a four-dimensional space. For a quaternion q = a + b i + c j + d k, Hamilton used two projections: S q = a , for the scalar part of q , and V q = b i + c j + d k, the vector part.
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. [1] [2] 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.
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.
Maxwell's equations allow us to use a given set of initial and boundary conditions to deduce, for every point in Euclidean space, a magnitude and direction for the force experienced by a charged test particle at that point; the resulting vector field is the electric field.
The bivector a ∧ b has an attitude (or direction) of the plane spanned by a and b, has an area that is a scalar multiple of any reference plane segment with the same attitude (and in geometric algebra, it has a magnitude equal to the area of the parallelogram with edges a and b), and has an orientation being the side of a on which b lies ...