Definition: Orthogonality: Let . A vector is called orthogonal to if . For all

  • This is saying no matter how we scale the vectors, they stay orthogonal to each other

Definition: Let be non-empty. Define, S-perp as

  • This can be show to be a linear subspace.
    • This means that means that any linear combination of orthogonal vectors will also be orthogonal

Proposition: Let . Then, is a linear subspace of . Proof: Pick . Then, and , for all , for all , for all . Hence, is a a linear subspace.

Definition: Let be a linear subspace of . Then, is called the orthogonal complement of . From this, this means that and that

Remark: Let and be the collection of all vectors orthogonal to the elements of . Then the linear span of the set is the same as set: .

Pythagorean identity: let be such that , whenever . Then, Proof: Base case: for . . Since we know that the dot product between the two elements must be zero, we can eliminate . This proves Assume, for , , whenever for , suppose, bet such that . Say that By the inductive assumption, and hence