this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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Explain Like I’m Five
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@meowmeowmeow
Ah, I should have been more specific, but you pretty much have the right idea. A vector is, abstractly, something with a length and a direction, like a velocity or force in physics. But to actually make calculations with vectors it helps to represent them with lists of numbers like your example. The convention is that we write vectors vertically, hence "column vector." Writing them horizontally as rows instead represents "covectors," but I won't get into the weeds on that.