When viewed as matrices, it is the group of all matrices that preserve the dot product, i.e.:
This implies that it also preserves important geometric notions such as norm (intuitively: distance between two points) and angles.
This is perhaps the best "default definition".
By looking at this more general point of view, we could ask ourselves what happens to the group if instead of the dot product we took a more general bilinear form, e.g.:
The answers to those questions are given by the Sylvester's law of inertia at Section "All indefinite orthogonal groups of matrices of equal metric signature are isomorphic".

Articles by others on the same topic (0)

There are currently no matching articles.