Moment of inertia is diagonal and torques around the axes act independently of each other. When a body is free to rotate around an axis, torque must be applied to change its angular momentum. The amount of torque needed to cause any given angular acceleration (the rate of change in angular velocity) is proportional to the moment of inertia of the body. Moment of inertia may be expressed in units of kilogram meter squared (kg·m) in SI units and pound-foot-second squared (lbf·ft·s) in imperial or US units. Moment of inertia plays the role in rotational kinetics that mass (inertia) plays in linear kinetics
Angular velocity arbitrary vector, from nondegeneracy of scalar product follows For angular velocity tensor maps positions to velocities, it is a vector field. In particular, this vector field is a Killing vector field belonging to an element of the Lie algebra so(3) of the 3-dimensional rotation group SO(3). This element of so(3) can also be regarded as the angular velocity vector. The same equations for the angular speed can be obtained reasoning over a rotating rigid body. Here is not assumed that the rigid body rotates around the origin. Instead, it can be supposed rotating around an arbitrary point that is moving