outer product
Noun
Meaning
outer product (plural outer products)
(mathematics, linear algebra) The tensor product of two vectors.
Synonyms
Examples
It is not the outer product of linear algebra.
For a finite-dimensional vector space, the outer product can be understood as simple matrix multiplication: : The outer product is an N×N matrix, as expected for a linear operator.
Extensions of the inner and outer products It is common practice to extend the outer product on vectors to the entire algebra.
If the dimensions are the same, then the inner product is the trace of the outer product (trace only being properly defined for square matrices).
In other words, the geometric product of two distinct vectors is completely specified by their outer product, or more generally : Therefore, every blade of grade r can be written as a geometric product of r vectors.
Note that the outer product is defined for different dimensions, while the inner product requires the same dimension.