Shmoop loves pointing things out, whether they're

• logical fallacies.
• historical landmarks.
• historical fallacies about landmarks.
• logical history about fallacies.

Some points are more useful than others, but our favorite hobby is standing on a sidewalk of a city, pointing to a building, and explaining its history to people passing by. It's like being a museum docent, except you don't get money for it and people don't always like it when you pull out their earbuds to make them pay attention to you.

Anyway.

When Shmoop points to a building, we're making a real-life vector.

Warning: Shmoop doesn't endorse the use of pointing for any purpose other than bothering pedestrians. Point at your own risk.

A vector is an object with magnitude—length—and direction—the way it's pointing.Magnitude is how big something is and direction is the azimuth (the angle) and elevation (the height) of an object from the frame of reference (viewpoint) of a central point. Because they head in specific directions at specific angles, scientists use arrows to represent vectors. 

 

 

Vectors show the general movement of a complex form. Instead of making you think about every single molecule in a lake, vectors let you generalize some of the movements going on when a pebble's dropped in by drawing arrows to represent the movement of a bunch of molecules. What a time saver.

You can thank them later.