Vector

In their modern form, vectors appeared late in the 19th century when Josiah Willard
Gibbs and Oliver Heaviside (of the United States and Britain, respectively)
independently developed vector analysis to express the new laws of electromagnetism
discovered by the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell.
Vectors are often expressed using coordinates. For example, in two dimensions a
Cartesian systemvector can be defined by a pair of coordinates (a1, a2) describing
an arrow going from the origin (0, 0) to the point (a1, a2). If one vector is (a1,
a2) and another is (b1, b2), then their sum is (a1 + b1, a2 + b2); this gives the
same result as the parallelogram . In three dimensions a vector is expressed using
Cartesian three coordinates (a1, a2, a3), and this idea extends to any number of
dimensions.