23.1.3 Vectors

vect is a package of functions for vector analysis. load ("vect") loads this package, and demo ("vect") displays a demonstration.

The vector analysis package can combine and simplify symbolic expressions including dot products and cross products, together with the gradient, divergence, curl, and Laplacian operators. The distribution of these operators over sums or products is governed by several flags, as are various other expansions, including expansion into components in any specific orthogonal coordinate systems. There are also functions for deriving the scalar or vector potential of a field.

The vect package contains these functions: vectorsimp, scalefactors, express, potential, and vectorpotential.

By default the vect package does not declare the dot operator to be a commutative operator. To get a commutative dot operator ., the command declare(".", commutative) must be executed.