geometry - What does the dot product of two vectors represent? - Mathematics Stack Exchange
How to calculate Dot Product of Two Vectors?
What does the dot product tell you?
What is the point of dot products and cross products (Geometrically & Physics)?
What is the significance of the dot product?
What are the properties of Dot Product?
What is a cross product of a two vector method?
Videos
I know how to find dot product, it's not hard, but I don't see any real-world applications or any applications in future math. Does it say something about the vectors involved?
The dot product tells you what amount of one vector goes in the direction of another. For instance, if you pulled a box 10 meters at an inclined angle, there is a horizontal component and a vertical component to your force vector. So the dot product in this case would give you the amount of force going in the direction of the displacement, or in the direction that the box moved. This is important because work is defined to be force multiplied by displacement, but the force here is defined to be the force in the direction of the displacement.
http://youtu.be/KDHuWxy53uM
Geometric Meaning
As other answers have pointed out, the dot product is related to the angle
between
and
through:
Assuming that and
point into similar directions, i.e., $\theta \leq 90°$, we can visualize what this relationship means (skipping the vector arrows and Euclidean norm subscript from now on):

is the vector resulting from an orthogonal projection of
onto
. As the
is the ratio between the adjacent leg (
) and the hypotenuse (
) in the right triangle, i.e.,
we get for the inner product:
So, the inner product is the length of the vector , the projection of
onto
, multiplied by the length of
. If
and
point into opposite directions, i.e., $90° < \theta \leq 180°$, the dot product will be the negative:
Derivation
The problem is that the relationship between the dot product and the angle is not inherently given. By definition:
So, we need to find a link between this and the cosine. From the definition of the dot product, we can see that it scales proportionally with the input vectors, so for non-unit vectors and
with the corresponding unit vectors
and
:
For simplicity, we will assume and
to be unit vectors. Thus, we only need to show
or, by the definition of , we need to show:
Let's calculate the length of the projection using
and
. We can start by using the Pythagorean theorem:
Because is a unit vector:
Now, we need to calculate the length of using the other rectangular triangle. Again, we use the fact that
is a unit vector, i.e.,
.
Now, we can insert this term for in the equation above:
In the figure, we see that . Therefore,
, or:
Thus, we can express as:
Finally:
q.e.d.