Express a Vector in Polar Form - Pre-Calculus

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Question

Rewrite the vector from Cartesian coordinates to polar coordinates .

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Answer

To convert to polar form, we need to find the magnitude of the vector, , and the angle it forms with the positive -axis going counterclockwise, or . This is shown in the figure below.

Vecfssec

We find the angle using trigonometric identities:

Using a calculator,

To find the magnitude of a vector, we add up the squares of each component and take the square root:

.

So, our vector written in polar form is

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