Concept
Kronecker delta
Related concepts (23)
Indicator function
In mathematics, an indicator function or a characteristic function of a subset of a set is a function that maps elements of the subset to one, and all other elements to zero. That is, if A is a subset of some set X, then if and otherwise, where is a common notation for the indicator function. Other common notations are and The indicator function of A is the Iverson bracket of the property of belonging to A; that is, For example, the Dirichlet function is the indicator function of the rational numbers as a subset of the real numbers.
Tensor
In mathematics, a tensor is an algebraic object that describes a multilinear relationship between sets of algebraic objects related to a vector space. Tensors may map between different objects such as vectors, scalars, and even other tensors. There are many types of tensors, including scalars and vectors (which are the simplest tensors), dual vectors, multilinear maps between vector spaces, and even some operations such as the dot product.
Unit vector
In mathematics, a unit vector in a normed vector space is a vector (often a spatial vector) of length 1. A unit vector is often denoted by a lowercase letter with a circumflex, or "hat", as in (pronounced "v-hat"). The term direction vector, commonly denoted as d, is used to describe a unit vector being used to represent spatial direction and relative direction. 2D spatial directions are numerically equivalent to points on the unit circle and spatial directions in 3D are equivalent to a point on the unit sphere.
Differential operator
In mathematics, a differential operator is an operator defined as a function of the differentiation operator. It is helpful, as a matter of notation first, to consider differentiation as an abstract operation that accepts a function and returns another function (in the style of a higher-order function in computer science). This article considers mainly linear differential operators, which are the most common type. However, non-linear differential operators also exist, such as the Schwarzian derivative.
Reflection (mathematics)
In mathematics, a reflection (also spelled reflexion) is a mapping from a Euclidean space to itself that is an isometry with a hyperplane as a set of fixed points; this set is called the axis (in dimension 2) or plane (in dimension 3) of reflection. The image of a figure by a reflection is its in the axis or plane of reflection. For example the mirror image of the small Latin letter p for a reflection with respect to a vertical axis (a vertical reflection) would look like q.
Penrose graphical notation
In mathematics and physics, Penrose graphical notation or tensor diagram notation is a (usually handwritten) visual depiction of multilinear functions or tensors proposed by Roger Penrose in 1971. A diagram in the notation consists of several shapes linked together by lines. The notation widely appears in modern quantum theory, particularly in matrix product states and quantum circuits. In particular, Categorical quantum mechanics which includes ZX-calculus is a fully comprehensive reformulation of quantum theory in terms of Penrose diagrams, and is now widely used in quantum industry.
Support (mathematics)
In mathematics, the support of a real-valued function is the subset of the function domain containing the elements which are not mapped to zero. If the domain of is a topological space, then the support of is instead defined as the smallest closed set containing all points not mapped to zero. This concept is used very widely in mathematical analysis. Suppose that is a real-valued function whose domain is an arbitrary set The of written is the set of points in where is non-zero: The support of is the smallest subset of with the property that is zero on the subset's complement.
Antisymmetric tensor
In mathematics and theoretical physics, a tensor is antisymmetric on (or with respect to) an index subset if it alternates sign (+/−) when any two indices of the subset are interchanged. The index subset must generally either be all covariant or all contravariant. For example, holds when the tensor is antisymmetric with respect to its first three indices. If a tensor changes sign under exchange of each pair of its indices, then the tensor is completely (or totally) antisymmetric.
Heaviside step function
The Heaviside step function, or the unit step function, usually denoted by H or θ (but sometimes u, 1 or ), is a step function named after Oliver Heaviside, the value of which is zero for negative arguments and one for positive arguments. It is an example of the general class of step functions, all of which can be represented as linear combinations of translations of this one. The function was originally developed in operational calculus for the solution of differential equations, where it represents a signal that switches on at a specified time and stays switched on indefinitely.
Outer product
In linear algebra, the outer product of two coordinate vectors is the matrix whose entries are all products of an element in the first vector with an element in the second vector. If the two coordinate vectors have dimensions n and m, then their outer product is an n × m matrix. More generally, given two tensors (multidimensional arrays of numbers), their outer product is a tensor. The outer product of tensors is also referred to as their tensor product, and can be used to define the tensor algebra.