Wednesday, February 27, 2019

vectors - Why do we need both dot product and cross product?


I was looking for an intuitive definition for dot product and cross product. I have found two similar quesitions in SO, but I am not satisfied with the answers. Finally I found a possible answer here. It says dot product actually gives us a way to depict mathematically how parallel two lines are and on the other side cross products tells us how two lines are perpendicular to each other. So my question is why do we want both. Why cant we just have dot product?




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classical mechanics - Moment of a force about a given axis (Torque) - Scalar or vectorial?

I am studying Statics and saw that: The moment of a force about a given axis (or Torque) is defined by the equation: $M_X = (\vec r \times \...