Unit vector in the context of Norm (mathematics)

In geometry, a normal is an object (e.g. a line, ray, or vector) that is perpendicular to a given object. For example, the normal line to a plane curve at a given point is the infinite straight line perpendicular to the tangent line to the curve at the point.

A normal vector is a vector perpendicular to a given object at a particular point.A normal vector of length one is called a unit normal vector or normal direction. A curvature vector is a normal vector whose length is the curvature of the object. Multiplying a normal vector by −1 results in the opposite vector, which may be used for indicating sides (e.g., interior or exterior) or orientation (e.g., clockwise vs. counterclockwise, right handed vs. left handed).

In physics, circulation is the line integral of a vector field around a closed curve embedded in the field. In fluid dynamics, the field is the fluid velocity field. In electrodynamics, it can be the electric or the magnetic field.

In aerodynamics, it finds applications in the calculation of lift, for which circulation was first used independently by Frederick Lanchester, Ludwig Prandtl, Martin Kutta and Nikolay Zhukovsky. It is usually denoted by Γ (uppercase gamma).

In geometry, the orientation, attitude, bearing, direction, or angular position of an object – such as a line, plane or rigid body – is part of the description of how it is placed in the space it occupies.More specifically, it refers to the imaginary rotation that is needed to move the object from a reference placement to its current placement. A rotation may not be enough to reach the current placement, in which case it may be necessary to add an imaginary translation to change the object's position (or linear position). The position and orientation together fully describe how the object is placed in space. The above-mentioned imaginary rotation and translation may be thought to occur in any order, as the orientation of an object does not change when it translates, and its position does not change when it rotates.

Euler's rotation theorem shows that in three dimensions any orientation can be reached with a single rotation around a fixed axis. This gives one common way of representing the orientation using an axis–angle representation. Other widely used methods include rotation quaternions, rotors, Euler angles, or rotation matrices. More specialist uses include Miller indices in crystallography, strike and dip in geology and grade on maps and signs.A unit vector may also be used to represent an object's normal vector direction or the relative direction between two points.

In geometry, Euler's rotation theorem states that, in three-dimensional space, any displacement of a rigid body such that a point on the rigid body remains fixed, is equivalent to a single rotation about some axis that runs through the fixed point. It also means that the composition of two rotations is also a rotation. Therefore the set of rotations has a group structure, known as a rotation group.

The theorem is named after Leonhard Euler, who proved it in 1775 by means of spherical geometry. The axis of rotation is known as an Euler axis, typically represented by a unit vector ê. Its product by the rotation angle is known as an axis-angle vector. The extension of the theorem to kinematics yields the concept of instant axis of rotation, a line of fixed points.

In geometry, biology, mineralogy and solid state physics, a unit cell is a repeating unit formed by the vectors spanning the points of a lattice. Despite its suggestive name, the unit cell (unlike a unit vector, for example) does not necessarily have unit size, or even a particular size at all. Rather, the primitive cell is the closest analogy to a unit vector, since it has a determined size for a given lattice and is the basic building block from which larger cells are constructed.

The concept is used particularly in describing crystal structure in two and three dimensions, though it makes sense in all dimensions. A lattice can be characterized by the geometry of its unit cell, which is a section of the tiling (a parallelogram or parallelepiped) that generates the whole tiling using only translations.

In mathematics, the axis–angle representation parameterizes a rotation in a three-dimensional Euclidean space by two quantities: a unit vector e indicating the direction of an axis of rotation, and an angle of rotation θ describing the magnitude and sense (e.g., clockwise) of the rotation about the axis. Only two numbers, not three, are needed to define the direction of a unit vector e rooted at the origin because the magnitude of e is constrained. For example, the elevation and azimuth angles of e suffice to locate it in any particular Cartesian coordinate frame.

By Rodrigues' rotation formula, the angle and axis determine a transformation that rotates three-dimensional vectors. The rotation occurs in the sense prescribed by the right-hand rule.

Unit quaternions, known as versors, provide a convenient mathematical notation for representing spatial orientations and rotations of elements in three dimensional space. Specifically, they encode information about an axis-angle rotation about an arbitrary axis. Rotation and orientation quaternions have applications in computer graphics, computer vision, robotics, navigation, molecular dynamics, flight dynamics, orbital mechanics of satellites, and crystallographic texture analysis.

When used to represent rotation, unit quaternions are also called rotation quaternions as they represent the 3D rotation group. When used to represent an orientation (rotation relative to a reference coordinate system), they are called orientation quaternions or attitude quaternions. A spatial rotation around a fixed point of ${\displaystyle \theta }$ radians about a unit axis ${\displaystyle (X,Y,Z)}$ that denotes the Euler axis is given by the quaternion ${\displaystyle (C,X\,S,Y\,S,Z\,S)}$, where ${\displaystyle C=\cos(\theta /2)}$ and ${\displaystyle S=\sin(\theta /2)}$.

In mathematics, particularly linear algebra, an orthonormal basis for an inner product space ${\displaystyle V}$ with finite dimension is a basis for ${\displaystyle V}$ whose vectors are orthonormal, that is, they are all unit vectors and orthogonal to each other. For example, the standard basis for a Euclidean space ${\displaystyle \mathbb {R} ^{n}}$ is an orthonormal basis, where the relevant inner product is the dot product of vectors. The image of the standard basis under a rotation or reflection (or any orthogonal transformation) is also orthonormal, and every orthonormal basis for ${\displaystyle \mathbb {R} ^{n}}$ arises in this fashion.An orthonormal basis can be derived from an orthogonal basis via normalization.The choice of an origin and an orthonormal basis forms a coordinate frame known as an orthonormal frame.

For a general inner product space ${\displaystyle V,}$ an orthonormal basis can be used to define normalized orthogonal coordinates on ${\displaystyle V.}$ Under these coordinates, the inner product becomes a dot product of vectors. Thus the presence of an orthonormal basis reduces the study of a finite-dimensional inner product space to the study of ${\displaystyle \mathbb {R} ^{n}}$ under the dot product. Every finite-dimensional inner product space has an orthonormal basis, which may be obtained from an arbitrary basis using the Gram–Schmidt process.

In physics, a plane wave is a special case of a wave or field: a physical quantity whose value, at any given moment, is constant through any plane that is perpendicular to a fixed direction in space.

For any position ${\displaystyle {\vec {x}}}$ in space and any time ${\displaystyle t}$, the value of such a field can be written as$${\displaystyle F({\vec {x}},t)=G({\vec {x}}\cdot {\vec {n}},t),}$$where ${\displaystyle {\vec {n}}}$ is a unit-length vector, and ${\displaystyle G(d,t)}$ is a function that gives the field's value as dependent on only two real parameters: the time ${\displaystyle t}$, and the scalar-valued displacement ${\displaystyle d={\vec {x}}\cdot {\vec {n}}}$ of the point ${\displaystyle {\vec {x}}}$ along the direction ${\displaystyle {\vec {n}}}$. The displacement is constant over each plane perpendicular to ${\displaystyle {\vec {n}}}$.

In mathematics, the scalar projection of a vector ${\displaystyle \mathbf {a} }$ on (or onto) a vector ${\displaystyle \mathbf {b} ,}$ also known as the scalar resolute of ${\displaystyle \mathbf {a} }$ in the direction of ${\displaystyle \mathbf {b} ,}$ is given by:

where the operator ${\displaystyle \cdot }$ denotes a dot product, ${\displaystyle {\hat {\mathbf {b} }}}$ is the unit vector in the direction of ${\displaystyle \mathbf {b} ,}$ ${\displaystyle \left\|\mathbf {a} \right\|}$ is the length of ${\displaystyle \mathbf {a} ,}$ and ${\displaystyle \theta }$ is the angle between ${\displaystyle \mathbf {a} }$ and ${\displaystyle \mathbf {b} }$.

In classical mechanics, a central force on an object is a force that is directed towards or away from a point called center of force.$${\displaystyle \mathbf {F} (\mathbf {r} )=F(\mathbf {r} ){\hat {\mathbf {r} }}}$$where F is a force vector, F is a scalar valued force function (whose absolute value gives the magnitude of the force and is positive if the force is outward and negative if the force is inward), r is the position vector, ||r|| is its length, and ${\textstyle {\hat {\mathbf {r} }}=\mathbf {r} /\|\mathbf {r} \|}$ is the corresponding unit vector.

Not all central force fields are conservative or spherically symmetric. However, a central force is conservative if and only if it is spherically symmetric or rotationally invariant. Examples of spherically symmetric central forces include the Coulomb force and the force of gravity.