right hand rule

Right Hand Rule: Don't hurt yourself

rallain | July 6, 2010

It is that part of the semester where the Right Hand Rule (RHR) comes out. Really, the best part is the students taking the tests. They make all these funny motions with their hands. That makes tests more entertaining (for me) than they usually are. What is the RHR? Suppose I have two numbers. Maybe these two numbers are the length and width of a piece of paper. Now suppose I need to multiply length times width to get the area (A = L x W). Simple - right? But that is multiplication for scalar variables. How do you multiply vectors? There are two common operations you can do with…

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Right Hand Rule: Don't hurt yourself

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