ABSTRACT
Near the close of the nineteenth century, Lord Kelvin, the great British physicist, wrote that vectors have “never been of the slightest use to any creature.” [4, p. 772] In this chapter, we will give them a wee look nonetheless. You will learn how to use Maple to compute dot products and cross products, to represent vectors as directed segments, and to enhance the illusion of three-dimensionality for plots of vectors in space. As usual, we will create some new animated demonstrations: one for teaching the concept of the cross product vector, one for velocity and acceleration vectors in two dimensions, and another for illustrating the central idea in the development of equations of lines in space.
