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Subsections

# Vectors

## Introduction

The purpose of this lab is to acquaint you with some of the vector capabilities in Maple.

## Vectors

Many commands used in this lab come from the linalg package, which must be loaded before any of the commands can be used. The following is a list of the commands discussed in this lab. Note that these form only a small subset of the package which is designed primarily for linear algebra.
Used to define a vector.
Computes the dot product of two vectors.
Computes the cross product of two vectors.
Evaluates expressions involving vectors.
Computes the norm, or length of a vector. For reasons explained below, the use of this commmand is not recommended. A better alternative for our purposes is to use the square root of the dot product of a vector with itself.
The first set of examples below demonstrates how to compute linear combinations of vectors, dot products, lengths, and vector components for fixed vectors.
> with(linalg):
> a := [2, 13, -6];
> b := [5, -4, 17];
> a+b;
> 5*a-2*b;
> dotprod(a,b);
> crossprod(a,b);
> crossprod(b,a);
> dotprod(a,crossprod(a,b));

The next two commands show two different ways to compute the length of a vector. The first way uses the norm command. Note the as the second argument of the command. The has to be there, or else Maple uses a different norm than the one we want. The second way, using the fact that , is prefered for the reasons given in the examples below dealing with arbitrary vectors.
> norm(a,2);
> sqrt(dotprod(a,a));

The final example for fixed vectors shows two methods for computing the vector projection or component of b in the direction a. Method one first computes the unit vector of a.
> a_unit := evalm(a/sqrt(dotprod(a,a)));
> comp_a1 := evalm(dotprod(b,a_unit)*a_unit);

The second method uses the formula for the component.
> comp_a2 := evalm(dotprod(b,a)/dotprod(a,a)*a);


## Exercises

1. Given the vectors compute the following:
a)
b)
2. Given the following triangle with the points ,, and
a)
Show that the triangle is a right triangle using the dot product.
b)
Find the area of the triangle using the cross product.

Next: About this document ... Up: lab_template Previous: lab_template
Jane E Bouchard
2006-09-27