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I suggest that the technically correct term is "basis vectors".
Then there is no confusion with the scalar components.
Regards,
Jack
On Tue, 17 Sep 2002, RAUBER, JOEL wrote:
Sorry, John - but my email software did not properly
translate your html code
- odd, because the code looks fine. However, I could get the
point of what you
are saying. Yes, Serway does use the two vectors Ax and Ay -
however, he is
careful not to use the word "component" until he actually
defines the term
from the scalar lengths of those vectors. Then he drops the
vectors Ax and Ay
completely throughout the remainder of the text and only uses scalar
components. I think his presentation could have been even
stronger by leaving
out those two vectors entirely
I rather like the use of the vectors A_x and A_y, as they provide a nice
geometric approach to introducing the idea of components. One has probably
just finished defining vector addition geometrically (head-to-tail and
parallel transport). Its then natural to define component vectors as those
unique vectors parallel to the coordinate axes that add up to the vector A.
One can then write:
A_x vector = (A_x) i_hat etc
which introduces unit vectors and the scalar components as usual.
Joel Rauber
--
"What did Barrow's lectures contain? Bourbaki writes with some
scorn that in his book in a hundred pages of the text there are about 180
drawings. (Concerning Bourbaki's books it can be said that in a thousand
pages there is not one drawing, and it is not at all clear which is
worse.)"
V. I. Arnol'd in
Huygens & Barrow, Newton & Hooke