Scalar projection (1 Viewer)

[tywebb]

It has come to my attention that some teachers are saying scalar projection is just the length of the vector projection.

This is wrong.

The syllabus (and even the newer draft syllabus) and some textbooks are not very clear on this issue.

Nevertheless the year 12 Ext. 1 Mastering maths book makes it clearer



and you know that the dot product can be negative, positive or zero.

 

[liamkk112]

It has come to my attention that some teachers are saying scalar projection is just the length of the vector projection.

This is wrong.

The syllabus (and even the newer draft syllabus) and some textbooks are not very clear on this issue.

Nevertheless the year 12 Ext. 1 Mastering maths book makes it clearer

View attachment 43392

and you know that the dot product can be negative, positive or zero.

yeah it's better to think of the scalar projection as the signed length of the vector projection, so you can tell from the scalar projection if the vectors are pointing in relatively the same or opposite direction (although my teacher did cover this aspect in detail when we learned projections)