Copy of Copy of 1. Cartesian components of vectors
Key Point
In two dimensions, the unit vectors in the directions of the two coordinate axes are written as and . If a point P has coordinates (x, y) then the position vector may be written as a linear combination of unit vectors: or equivalently as a column vector . x and y are scalars (real numbers) and they represent the coordinates of the point P. The expression is a vector. Given an initial point of (0,0) and terminal point (a,b), a vector may be represented as (a,b).