English Wikipedia - The Free Encycl...
Download this dictionary
Tangent vector
For a more general, but much more technical, treatment of tangent vectors, see
tangent space
.
In
mathematics
, a
tangent vector
is a
vector
that is
tangent
to a
curve
or
surface
at a given point. Tangent vectors are described in the
differential geometry of curves
in the context of curves in
R
n
. More generally, tangent vectors are elements of a
tangent space
of a
differentiable manifold
. Tangent vectors can also be described in terms of
germs
. In other words, a tangent vector at the point
is a linear
derivation
of the algebra defined by the set of germs at
.
See more at Wikipedia.org...
© This article uses material from
Wikipedia
®
and is licensed under the
GNU Free Documentation License
and under the
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License