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Angles, areas, volumes: dot product and determinant
Ondič, Milan ; Beran, Filip (advisor) ; Zamboj, Michal (referee)
This bachelor thesis deals with the introduction of scalar product and determinant, which are important tools of analytic geometry. The purpose of the thesis is to provide a parallel interpretation of these two key concepts of advanced algebra - the dot product and the determinant - primarily from a geometric, not an algebraic, point of view. The aim of the thesis is to show how both representations can be derived just by solving geometric problems in two-dimensional space and then how to transfer them to three-dimensional space. The first part of the work is devoted to finding the angle between two vectors in the plane and to calculating the area of a triangle. Both of problems are solved in several ways and then the scalar product and determinant are derived. The second part of the work is devoted to three-dimensional space, in particular the angle between two vectors, lines and planes and the volume of a tetrahedron and parallelogram. This is then supplemented by the introduction of some notions of linear algebra, an investigation of the algebraic properties of the dot product and determinant, and a generalization of the notions to the n-dimensional space. The last part of the thesis is devoted to the analysis of selected czech high school mathematics textbooks in terms of the occurrence and...
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