 Noncommuting rotations about fixed axes

Use a fixed right-handed Cartesian basis in three dimensions and active rotations in three dimensions through $\pi /2$ radians. The right-hand rule gives the following rotation matrices about the positive $x$ and $z$ axes:For the vector $v=(1,1,0{)}^T$, the two orders giveBoth outputs have Euclidean norm $\sqrt{2}$, but they point in different directions. Each arrow below is a vector from the origin; the curved paths track its endpoint during each rotation in three dimensions.

The axes in this example remain fixed throughout. A command to turn about an object's own current axis describes a different operation because that axis can move after the first turn. With an object's orthonormal basis represented by columns of $Q$, a fixed-axis rotation matrix $R$ acts by $RQ$, whereas the corresponding rotation expressed in the object's own basis acts by $QR$.^[ref]