dot product

American  

noun

Mathematics.

1. inner product.

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dot product British  

noun

1. another name for scalar product

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Etymology

Origin of dot product

First recorded in 1930–35

Example Sentences

The dot product can also help us measure the angle formed by a pair of vectors and the position of a vector relative to the coordinate axes.

From Textbooks • Mar. 30, 2016

As you might expect, to calculate the dot product of four-dimensional vectors, we simply add the products of the components as before, but the sum has four terms instead of three.

From Textbooks • Mar. 30, 2016

Note that if u and v are two-dimensional vectors, we calculate the dot product in a similar fashion.

From Textbooks • Mar. 30, 2016

Using the dot product, find the projection of vector v12 found in step 4 onto unit vector n found in step 3.

From Textbooks • Mar. 30, 2016

In this section, we develop an operation called the dot product, which allows us to calculate work in the case when the force vector and the motion vector have different directions.

From Textbooks • Mar. 30, 2016