3. Addition and subtraction of vectors
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Given a vector and any point O, the triangle rule for addition shows us that = + . We can rewrite this equation as
Since points to the head of the vector and points to its tail, we call this the “head-minus-tail” rule.
The advantage of this rule is that it allows us to rewrite all the vectors occurring in a problem as combinations of vectors emanating from a given point O (often called the origin). |
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