User:Braveorca/Algebra

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Braveorca (talk | contribs) at 00:56, 8 July 2006. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

This is a list of theorems and formulae from the books on algebra I'm studying. I'm putting them here because of Wikipedia's handy png-rendering capabilities. It's not in the main namespace because I feel that it isn't really appropriate, as many of the comments are my additional notes and the such. once it's reasonably complete, I'll clean it up and it may be incorporated into an article somewhere, or possibly even a reference for anyone to use. Feel free to take/modify as you please (this is a wiki, after all).

Vectors

Basic operations

For any vectors   and any scalars  , the following properties hold:

  •   (associativity)
  •   (additive identity)
  •   (additive inverse)
  •   (commutativity)
  •   (left distributive)
  •   (right distributive)
  •  
  •  


Dot product

Also called inner product. This, in contrast to the cross product, is a number  . Should this quantity equal zero, the vectors in quetion are orthogonal (perpendicular).

Given

 

and

 

we have

 


Norm

Also called length. A vector with norm 1 is called a unit vector.

Given

 

we have

 


Normalizing

Generates a unique unit vector in the same direction as a given vector.

Given

 

we have