What you’ll learn to do:

When describing the movement of an airplane in flight, it is important to communicate two pieces of information: the direction in which the plane is traveling and the plane’s speed. When measuring a force, such as the thrust of the plane’s engines, it is important to describe not only the strength of that force, but also the direction in which it is applied. Some quantities, such as or force, are defined in terms of both size (also called magnitude) and direction. A quantity that has magnitude and direction is called a vector. In this text, we denote vectors by boldface letters, such as [latex]\bf{v}[/latex].