Ooh, do tensors next!
You should ask your biologist friend and your physicist friend and your compsci friend to debate about what vectors are. Singularities, too.
It’s a dynamically-sized list of objects of the same type stored contiguously in memory.
It’s like a fancy list.
What do you mean? A vector is a direction and magnitude!
Maybe they mean std::vector in C++?
It’s a terrible name. The math answer is what I would give.
Well mathematically isn’t it an n by 1 matrix.
Not always. Any m by n matrix is also a vector. Polynomials are vectors. As are continuous functions.
A vector is an element of a vector space over a field. These are sets which have a few operations, vector addition and scalar multiplication, and obey some well known rules, such as the existence of a zero vector (identity for vector addition), associativity and commutativity of vector addition, distributivity of scalar multiplication over vector sums, that sort of thing!
These basic properties give rise to more elaborate concepts such as linear independence, spanning sets, and the idea of a basis, though not all vector spaces have a finite basis.
It’s an array.
First time I heard of vectors in comp-sci was in C++. The naming still doesn’t make sense to me.
A vector is a list of numbers, at its most basic. You can add a lot of extra functionality to it, but at its core, its just a list.