Chapter 11 Introduction

1

Quaternions came from Hamilton \(\ldots\) and have been an unmixed evil to those who have touched them in any way. Vector is a useless survival \(\ldots\) and has never been of the slightest use to any creature.

–Lord Kelvin

In this chapter we consider the basic operations on vectors in two- and three-dimensional space: vector addition, scalar multiplication, and the dot and cross products. In Section 11.7 we generalize some of these notions to \(n\)-space and discuss properties of matrices that will be needed in later Chapters.