Orthonormality (Paperback)

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. In linear algebra, two vectors in an inner product space are orthonormal if they are orthogonal and both of unit length. A set of vectors form an orthonormal set if all vectors in the set are mutually orthogonal and all of unit length. An orthonormal set which forms a basis is called an orthonormal basis. The construction of orthogonality of vectors is motivated by a desire to extend the intuitive notion of perpendicular vectors to higher-dimensional spaces. In the Cartesian plane, two vectors are said to be perpendicular if the angle between them is 90 (i.e. if they form a right angle). This definition can be formalized in Cartesian space by defining the dot product and specifying that two vectors in the plane are orthogonal if their dot product is zero. Similarly, the construction of the norm of a vector is motivated by a desire to extend the intuitive notion of the length of a vector to higher-dimensional spaces. In Cartesian space, the norm of a vector is the square root of the vector dotted with itself.