From my First A-to-Z: Orthogonal

I haven’t had the space yet to finish my Little 2021 A-to-Z, so let me resume playing the hits of past ones. For my first, Summer 2015, one, I picked all the topics myself. This one, Orthogonal, I remember as one of the challenging ones. The challenge was the question put in the first paragraph: why do we have this term, which is so nearly a synonym for “perpendicular”? I didn’t find an answer, then, or since. But I was able to think about how we use “orthogonal” and what it might do that “perpendicular ” doesn’t..

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Orthogonal.

Orthogonal is another word for perpendicular. So why do we need another word for that?

It helps to think about why “perpendicular” is a useful way to organize things. For example, we can describe the directions to a place in terms of how far it is north-south and how far it is east-west, and talk about how fast it’s travelling in terms of its speed heading north or south and its speed heading east or west. We can separate the north-south motion from the east-west motion. If we’re lucky these motions separate entirely, and we turn a complicated two- or three-dimensional problem into two or three simpler problems. If they can’t be fully separated, they can often be largely separated. We turn a complicated problem into a set of simpler problems with a nice and easy part plus an annoying yet small hard part.

And this is why we like perpendicular directions. We can often turn a problem into several simpler ones describing each direction separately, or nearly so.

And now the amazing thing. We can separate these motions because the north-south and the east-west directions are at right angles to one another. But we can describe something that works like an angle between things that aren’t necessarily directions. For example, we can describe an angle between things like functions that have the same domain. And once we can describe the angle between two functions, we can describe functions that make right angles between each other.

This means we can describe functions as being perpendicular to one another. An example. On the domain of real numbers from -1 to 1, the function is perpendicular to the function . And when we want to study a more complicated function we can separate the part that’s in the “direction” of f(x) from the part that’s in the “direction” of g(x). We can treat functions, even functions we don’t know, as if they were locations in space. And we can study and even solve for the different parts of the function as if we were pinning down the north-south and the east-west movements of a thing.

So if we want to study, say, how heat flows through a body, we can work out a series of “direction” for functions, and work out the flow in each of those “directions”. These don’t have anything to do with left-right or up-down directions, but the concepts and the convenience is similar.

I’ve spoken about this in terms of functions. But we can define the “angle” between things for many kinds of mathematical structures. Once we can do that, we can have “perpendicular” pairs of things. I’ve spoken only about functions, but that’s because functions are more familiar than many of the mathematical structures that have orthogonality.

Ah, but why call it “orthogonal” rather than “perpendicular”? And I don’t know. The best I can work out is that it feels weird to speak of, say, the cosine function being “perpendicular” to the sine function when you can’t really say either is in any particular direction. “Orthogonal” seems to appeal less directly to physical intuition while still meaning something. But that’s my guess, rather than the verdict of a skilled etymologist.

A Leap Day 2016 Mathematics A To Z: Vector

And as we approach the last letters of the alphabet, my Leap Day A To Z gets to the lats of Gaurish’s requests.

Vector.

A vector’s a thing you can multiply by a number and then add to another vector.

Oh, I know what you’re thinking. Wasn’t a vector one of those things that points somewhere? A direction and a length in that direction? (Maybe dressed up in more formal language. I’m glad to see that apparently New Jersey Tech’s student newspaper is still The Vector and still uses the motto “With Magnitude And Direction’.) Yeah, that’s how we’re always introduced to it. Pointing to stuff is a good introduction to vectors. Nearly everyone finds their way around places. And it’s a good learning model, to learn how to multiply vectors by numbers and to add vectors together.

But thinking too much about directions, either in real-world three-dimensional space, or in the two-dimensional space of the thing we’re writing notes on, can be limiting. We can get too hung up on a particular representation of a vector. Usually that’s an ordered set of numbers. That’s all right as far as it goes, but why limit ourselves? A particular representation can be easy to understand, but as the scary people in the philosophy department have been pointing out for 26 centuries now, a particular example of a thing and the thing are not identical.

And if we look at vectors as “things we can multiply by a number, then add another vector to”, then we see something grand. We see a commonality in many different kinds of things. We can do this multiply-and-add with those things that point somewhere. Call those coordinates. But we can also do this with matrices, grids of numbers or other stuff it’s convenient to have. We can also do this with ordinary old numbers. (Think about it.) We can do this with polynomials. We can do this with sets of linear equations. We can do this with functions, as long as they’re defined for compatible domains. We can even do this with differential equations. We can see a unity in things that seem, at first, to have nothing to do with one another.

We call these collections of things “vector spaces”. It’s a space much like the space you happen to exist in is. Adding two things in the space together is much like moving from one place to another, then moving again. You can’t get out of the space. Multiplying a thing in the space by a real number is like going in one direction a short or a long or whatever great distance you want. Again you can’t get out of the space. This is called “being closed”.

(I know, you may be wondering if it isn’t question-begging to say a vector is a thing in a vector space, which is made up of vectors. It isn’t. We define a vector space as a set of things that satisfy a certain group of rules. The things in that set are the vectors.)

Vector spaces are nice things. They work much like ordinary space does. We can bring many of the ideas we know from spatial awareness to vector spaces. For example, we can usually define a “length” of things. And something that works like the “angle” between things. We can define bases, breaking down a particular element into a combination of standard reference elements. This helps us solve problems, by finding ways they’re shadows of things we already know how to solve. And it doesn’t take much to satisfy the rules of being a vector space. I think mathematicians studying new groups of objects look instinctively for how we might organize them into a vector space.

We can organize them further. A vector space that satisfies some rules about sequences of terms, and that has a “norm” which is pretty much a size, becomes a Banach space. It works a little more like ordinary three-dimensional space. A Banach space that has a norm defined by a certain common method is a Hilbert space. These work even more like ordinary space, but they don’t need anything in common with it. For example, the functions that describe quantum mechanics are in a Hilbert space. There’s a thing called a Sobolev Space, a kind of vector space that also meets criteria I forget, but the name has stuck with me for decades because it is so wonderfully assonant.

I mentioned how vectors are stuff you can multiply by numbers, and add to other vectors. That’s true, but it’s a little limiting. The thing we multiply a vector by is called a scalar. And the scalar is a number — real or complex-valued — so often it’s easy to think that’s the default. But it doesn’t have to be. The scalar just has to be an element of some field. A ‘field’ is a ring that you can do addition, multiplication, and division on. So numbers are the obvious choice. They’re not the only ones, though. The scalar has to be able to multiply with the vector, since otherwise the entire concept collapses into gibberish. But we wouldn’t go looking among the gibberish except to be funny anyway.

The idea of the ‘vector’ is straightforward and powerful. So we see it all over a wide swath of mathematics. It’s one of the things that shapes how we expect mathematics to look.

A Summer 2015 Mathematics A To Z: orthogonal

Orthogonal.

Orthogonal is another word for perpendicular. So why do we need another word for that?

It helps to think about why “perpendicular” is a useful way to organize things. For example, we can describe the directions to a place in terms of how far it is north-south and how far it is east-west, and talk about how fast it’s travelling in terms of its speed heading north or south and its speed heading east or west. We can separate the north-south motion from the east-west motion. If we’re lucky these motions separate entirely, and we turn a complicated two- or three-dimensional problem into two or three simpler problems. If they can’t be fully separated, they can often be largely separated. We turn a complicated problem into a set of simpler problems with a nice and easy part plus an annoying yet small hard part.

And this is why we like perpendicular directions. We can often turn a problem into several simpler ones describing each direction separately, or nearly so.

And now the amazing thing. We can separate these motions because the north-south and the east-west directions are at right angles to one another. But we can describe something that works like an angle between things that aren’t necessarily directions. For example, we can describe an angle between things like functions that have the same domain. And once we can describe the angle between two functions, we can describe functions that make right angles between each other.

This means we can describe functions as being perpendicular to one another. An example. On the domain of real numbers from -1 to 1, the function is perpendicular to the function . And when we want to study a more complicated function we can separate the part that’s in the “direction” of f(x) from the part that’s in the “direction” of g(x). We can treat functions, even functions we don’t know, as if they were locations in space. And we can study and even solve for the different parts of the function as if we were pinning down the north-south and the east-west movements of a thing.

So if we want to study, say, how heat flows through a body, we can work out a series of “direction” for functions, and work out the flow in each of those “directions”. These don’t have anything to do with left-right or up-down directions, but the concepts and the convenience is similar.

I’ve spoken about this in terms of functions. But we can define the “angle” between things for many kinds of mathematical structures. Once we can do that, we can have “perpendicular” pairs of things. I’ve spoken only about functions, but that’s because functions are more familiar than many of the mathematical structures that have orthogonality.

Ah, but why call it “orthogonal” rather than “perpendicular”? And I don’t know. The best I can work out is that it feels weird to speak of, say, the cosine function being “perpendicular” to the sine function when you can’t really say either is in any particular direction. “Orthogonal” seems to appeal less directly to physical intuition while still meaning something. But that’s my guess, rather than the verdict of a skilled etymologist.