Chapter 11 : Vectors

This is a fairly short chapter. We will be taking a brief look at vectors and some of their properties. We will need some of this material in the next chapter and those of you heading on towards Calculus III will use a fair amount of this there as well.

Here is a list of topics in this chapter.

Basic Concepts – In this section we will introduce some common notation for vectors as well as some of the basic concepts about vectors such as the magnitude of a vector and unit vectors. We also illustrate how to find a vector from its starting and end points.

Vector Arithmetic – In this section we will discuss the mathematical and geometric interpretation of the sum and difference of two vectors. We also define and give a geometric interpretation for scalar multiplication. We also give some of the basic properties of vector arithmetic and introduce the common \(i\), \(j\), \(k\) notation for vectors.

Dot Product – In this section we will define the dot product of two vectors. We give some of the basic properties of dot products and define orthogonal vectors and show how to use the dot product to determine if two vectors are orthogonal. We also discuss finding vector projections and direction cosines in this section.

Cross Product – In this section we define the cross product of two vectors and give some of the basic facts and properties of cross products.