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scalars

 

When talking about vectors, sometimes it can get confusing because one also talks about real numbers like tex2html_wrap_inline1656 or e at the same time. When mentioning good old regular numbers at the same time as vectors, it's useful to give these regular numbers a name to distinguish them from vectors. We call them scalars. Well actually there's a bit more to it than that. I'm being awfully cavalier. To explain this subtle point, take as an example the length of the vector tex2html_wrap_inline1630 above, so called tex2html_wrap_inline1662 . Note that when we rotated the coordinate system, tex2html_wrap_inline1662 didn't change. So that's a scalar. Now if instead you just look at the x component of a vector, then we saw that this did change. So you wouldn't want to call tex2html_wrap_inline1644 a scalar, though it is just a regular number. You might want to keep this subtlety in mind, though it probably won't come up very much here.



Joshua Deutsch
Mon Jan 6 00:05:26 PST 1997