What you’ll learn to do:

Imagine a mechanic turning a wrench to tighten a bolt. The mechanic applies a force at the end of the wrench. This creates rotation, or torque, which tightens the bolt. We can use vectors to represent the force applied by the mechanic, and the distance (radius) from the bolt to the end of the wrench. Then, we can represent torque by a vector oriented along the axis of rotation. Note that the torque vector is orthogonal to both the force vector and the radius vector.

In this section, we develop an operation called the cross product, which allows us to find a vector orthogonal to two given vectors. Calculating torque is an important application of cross products, and we examine torque in more detail later in the section.