Glossary

Argand diagram

A plot that represents complex numbers as points or vectors in a plane, with the horizontal axis showing the real part and the vertical axis showing the imaginary part.

dimensional analysis

Dimensional analysis is the method of examining the relationships between physical quantities by identifying their fundamental dimensions (such as mass, length, time, charge, etc.) and units of measurement, in order to check the consistency of equations, derive scaling laws, or reduce the number of variables in a problem.

machine precision

Machine precision is the smallest difference between two distinct floating-point numbers that a computer can represent.

matrix diagonal

The diagonal of a matrix is the set of elements that lie along the line from its top-left to bottom-right corner, where the row and column indices are equal.

perpendicular

Two vectors are said to be perpendicular if the angle between them is 90°, which occurs when their dot product equals zero.

real numbers

Real numbers are all numbers that can represent continuous quantities along a number line, in contrast to complex numbers, which include an imaginary component.

Reimann sum

A Riemann sum is an approximation of the area under a curve, calculated by summing the products of a function’s values at selected points and the widths of small subintervals over a given range.

symmteric matrix

A symmetric matrix is a square matrix that is equal to its transpose, meaning its entries are mirrored across the main diagonal.