Isn't there any inbuilt 3D vector functions in Sage?
For instance like a function to get the dot product, cross product or angle between two vectors? Or functions to get the distance from a point to a line? Find the intersections between two lines? Having such functions would be a great help and would greatly increase the speed of my workflow in school.
These are all accessible using the "dot" object-oriented notation. See, for example, this documentation, from which this example stems.
sage: v = vector([1,2,3]); w = vector([0,5,-9])
sage: v.cross_product(v)
(0, 0, 0)
sage: u = v.cross_product(w); u
(-33, 9, 5)
sage: u.dot_product(v)
0
sage: u.dot_product(w)
0
I don't think that Sage would include things that one is supposed to do mathematics for. The intersection of two lines would depend greatly on how you represented them, for instance - parametric, as an intersection of planes, as a formula in 2D... Same thing with an angle, which you can get from the cross *or* dot product with inverse trig functions. Of course, many of these would be relatively easy to implement, and we would welcome the addition.
Depends on what you want. For your own usage, you could put the code for such a thing in a .sage file and then have loading that file done automatically by an init.sage file (search for this). For wider distribution, see http://www.sagemath.org/doc/developer/walk_through.html for how to start contributing to Sage directly, or you could just upload code for an algorithm to a ticket you created on http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/.
Asked: 2012-04-25 07:43:34 +0100
Seen: 28,675 times
Last updated: Apr 25 '12
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