Mathematical notation is designed to create the correct ideas in the mind of the reader. It is deliberately ambiguous and incomplete; indeed, it is almost meaningless to all other readers.
-- Poppelier, Herwijnen and Rowley, "Standard dtd's and scientific publishing"
As the following table demonstrates, the notations used in vector calculus are myriad. Indeed, this table is not exhaustive.
For
the sake of uniformity, these pages will in general use bold letters
for vectors and unit vectors, such as v for a vector
and i for a unit vector.
Symbol | Definition |
---|---|
|
|
|
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|
The origin | |
|
|
| Displacement vector from P1 to P2 |
Unit vector in the direction of the positive y-axis | |
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