Vectors Flashcards
A vector can be described by:
Direction and magnitude.
How do you find its components from the module and angle?
Using Pythagoras & the function arctangent
What is the dot product between to vectors?
What does it represent?
The product of their modules and cosine of the angle between them.
This value represents how closely the vectors are
What happens if the dot product between two vectors is equal to zero?
It means the are perpendicular to each other.
What is the cross product between two vectors?
What does it represent?
It is the product between the modules of the vectors and the sine of the angle between them.
This represents another vector which is perpendicular to both vectors involved in the cross product.
What happens when the cross product between two vectors is the zero vector?
It means that the vectors involved in the product are parallel to each other
What are the direction cosines?
Special property?
They represent the angle that a vector generates with respect to the coordinate axes
The sum of the squares of the D.C. is equal to 1
How to get the direction cosines?
You get them by computing the cosine of a given coordinate of a vector divided by the magnitude of the vector.
