Abstract
When it is first encountered, the wedge product may appear both artificial and exotic. This appearance is deceptive. The wedge product is something like a generalization of the cross product of 3-dimensional vectors, so it should not be surprising that things looking like wedge products should arise in natural phenomena. Certain wedge products, the simple K-vectors, have striking geometric interpretations with a strong connection to determinants and oriented volume, so that the wedge product is an excellent tool for analytic geometry in Euclidean Spaces of arbitrary dimension. This connection with geometry leads in turn to an elegant and marvelously unified language for calculus not simply in Euclidean Spaces but in manifolds. It is this last aspect of the theory of wedge products which draws us to its study.
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© 2002 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Mikusiński, P., Taylor, M.D. (2002). K-Vectors and Wedge Products. In: An Introduction to Multivariable Analysis from Vector to Manifold. Birkhäuser, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-0073-4_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-0073-4_6
Publisher Name: Birkhäuser, Boston, MA
Print ISBN: 978-1-4612-6600-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-4612-0073-4
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