Perpendicular means that the angle between the two vectors is 90 degrees - a right angle. If you have the vectors as components, just take the dot product - if the dot product is zero, that means either that the vectors are perpendicular, or that one of the vectors has a magnitude of zero.
Chat with our AI personalities
The component of a vector x perpendicular to the vector y is x*y*sin(A) where A is the angle between the two vectors.
The two vectors form the minor legs of a right angled triangle and the resultant is the hypotenuse of the triangle. Its magnitude, therefore, is the square root of the sum of the squared magnitudes of the two vectors.
Two lines are said to be perpendicular when they are at right angles. That means that the angle between them is 90 degrees.There are other meanings of perpendicular; for example, a line is said to be perpendicular to a plane when it is perpendicular to EVERY line of the plane that goes through the intersection.
perpendicular to each other
(i) They are linearly dependent since the 2nd vector is twice the 1st vector. All 3 vectors lie in the x-z plane, so they don't span 3D space. (ii) They are linearly independent. Note that the cross-product of the first two is (-1,1,1). If the third vector is not perpendicular to the above cross-product, then the third vector does not lie in the plane defined by the first two vectors. (-1,1,1) "dot" (1,1,-1) = -1+1-1 = -1, not zero, so 3rd vector is not perpendicular to the cross product of the other two.