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Description of  Vector: A Surprising Story of Space, Time, and Mathematical Transformation

0226821102 pdf A celebration of the seemingly simple idea that allowed us to imagine the world in new dimensionssparking both controversy and discovery. The stars of this book, vectors and tensors, are unlikely celebrities. If you ever took a physics course, the word vector might remind you of the mathematics needed to determine forces on an amusement park ride, a turbine, or a projectile. You might also remember that a vector is a quantity that has magnitude and (this is the key) direction. In fact, vectors are examples of tensors, which can represent even more data. It sounds simple enoughand yet, as award-winning science writer Robyn Arianrhod shows in this riveting story, the idea of a single symbol expressing more than one thing at once was millennia in the making. And without that idea, we wouldnt have such a deep understanding of our world. Vector and tensor calculus offers an elegant language for expressing the way things behave in space and time, and Arianrhod shows how this enabled physicists and mathematicians to Read more