The Pleasures of 'Perp Dot' Products in Sagemath

etb
113 ●4 ●7 ●16

Francis S. Hill, Jr. has an vector operation he calls a-Perp. It is defined as the vector perpendicular to a that is rotated 90° counterclockwise (Hill 1994:138). Wolfram also has a page on the concept here. Similar to the Normal vector, but not quite.

I wonder if there's a default Sage function, or some handy way, to do this?

Say I have vector a

a = vector(QQ, [3, 4])

and I want to get

a_Perp = vector(QQ, [-4, 3])

Hill, F. S. Jr. "The Pleasures of 'Perp Dot' Products." Ch. II.5 in Graphics Gems IV (Ed. P. S. Heckbert). San Diego: Academic Press, pp. 138-148, 1994.

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answered 8 years ago

calc314
4191 ●22 ●48 ●113

Alternatively, you can use the rotation matrix.

a = vector(QQ, [3, 4])
m=matrix(QQ,[[0,-1],[1,0]])
a_perp=m*a

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I prefer this solution as it seems most flexible to me. Please chime in if if you have comments. I'm eager to learn.

etb ( 8 years ago )

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answered 8 years ago

B r u n o
1603 ●5 ●21 ●43

There is no such function defined in Sage. Yet, you can write it as:

sage: a_perp = vector([-a[1], a[0]])
sage: a_perp
(-4, 3)

If you think this function is useful, I urge you to add it (as well as maybe "perp-dot products") into Sage by creating a ticket on trac.sagemath.org.

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@b-r-u-n-o, thank you for your feedback and your answer.

etb ( 8 years ago )

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