12.6: Chapter Review

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In this chapter, we simulated the flight of a baseball with and without air resistance and saw that the difference is substantial. We can conclude that it’s important to model air resistance if we want to make accurate predictions about baseballs and similar projectiles.

Here are some terms from this chapter you might want to remember.

A spatial vector is a value that represents a multidimensional physical quantity like position, velocity, acceleration, or force. A spatial vector has a direction and a magnitude. The magnitude is also called the norm of the vector. A unit vector is a vector with norm 1, which is often used to represent a direction.

Concatenation is the operation of joining two vectors or matrices end-to-end to form a new vector or matrix.

In the next chapter, we’ll continue with the baseball example, using fzero, which we saw in Chapter 7, and a new tool for optimization, called fminsearch. We’ll also see a simple way to animate the solution of a differential equation.