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In my statics engineering class I found myself calculating the cross-product of two vectors over and over again to calculate the moment force. Things got more involved when we started calculating how much force was rotated about another vector. We were also using the cross product a fair amount in calculus class. I eventually got tired of screwing up my math. So I wrote a little program for my TI-82. I don't know how similar TI-8x calculators are between versions, but hopefully this program is compatible across all flavors or TI-8x. The program uses lists to hold the vector values, so if you have lists, you are probably okay.

This program takes a list as input so you will need to enter your vector in the form {i,j,k} where i,j, and k are the components values of your vector. The output is in the same format without the commas, ie. {i j k}. If you are completely clueless about programming a TI-8x, don't worry. All you need to do is create a new program (from the prgm menu). This will take you to the edit screen. Once you are in the edit screen clicking the prgm menu again will bring up another menu containing all the programming functions used by the calculator. All the functions used in this program can be found in the I/O and CTL menu lists. Enter each line into the program and hit 'ENTER' after each line to create a new line.

Check that the program works properly before you use it on a test! Don't bitch to me if you type something wrong and fail your next test.


Input "Vector 1:", L1
Input "Vector 2:", L2
(L1(2)*L2(3))-(L1(3)*L2(2))->A
(L1(1)*L2(3))-(L1(3)*L2(1))->B
(L1(3)*L2(1))-(L1(2)*L2(1))->C
{A, -B, C}->L3
Disp L3
Menu("Dot This?", "No", A, "Yes",B)
Lbl A
Return
Lbl B
Input "Vector 3:", L1
L1(1)*L3(1)+L1(2)*L3(2)+L1(3)*L3(3)->C
Disp C
Return