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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 vector pointing from A to B. In mathematics, physics, and engineering, a Euclidean vector or simply a vector (sometimes called a geometric vector [1] or spatial vector [2]) is a geometric object that has magnitude (or length) and direction. Euclidean vectors can be added and scaled to form a vector space. A vector quantity is a vector-valued ...
The term scalar is also sometimes used informally to mean a vector, matrix, tensor, or other, usually, "compound" value that is actually reduced to a single component. Thus, for example, the product of a 1 × n matrix and an n × 1 matrix, which is formally a 1 × 1 matrix, is often said to be a scalar. The real component of a quaternion is ...
List of physical quantities. This article consists of tables outlining a number of physical quantities. The first table lists the fundamental quantities used in the International System of Units to define the physical dimension of physical quantities for dimensional analysis. The second table lists the derived physical quantities.
Specifically, the divergence of a vector is a scalar. The divergence of a higher-order tensor field may be found by decomposing the tensor field into a sum of outer products and using the identity, where is the directional derivative in the direction of multiplied by its magnitude. Specifically, for the outer product of two vectors,
The cross-product in respect to a right-handed coordinate system. 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 ...
The scalar multiplications − a and 2 a of a vector a. In mathematics, scalar multiplication is one of the basic operations defining a vector space in linear algebra [1][2][3] (or more generally, a module in abstract algebra [4][5]). In common geometrical contexts, scalar multiplication of a real Euclidean vector by a positive real number ...
Velocity is a physical vector quantity: both magnitude and direction are needed to define it. The scalar absolute value (magnitude) of velocity is called speed, being a coherent derived unit whose quantity is measured in the SI (metric system) as metres per second (m/s or m⋅s −1). For example, "5 metres per second" is a scalar, whereas "5 ...