Areal velocity equal to the magnitude of the cross product of vectors "AB" and "AC". This area can also be viewed as a vector with this magnitude, pointing in a direction perpendicular to the parallelogram; this vector is the cross product itself: Hence The areal velocity is this vector area divided by Δ"t" in the limit that Δ"t" becomes vanishingly small: But, formula_4 is the velocity vector formula_5 of the moving particle, so that On the other hand, the angular momentum of the particle is and hence the angular momentum equals 2"m" times the areal velocity. Conservation of areal velocity is a
Cross product a and b provides an alternative definition of the cross product. The relation: can be compared with another relation involving the right-hand side, namely Lagrange's identity expressed as: where a and b may be "n"-dimensional vectors. This also shows that the Riemannian volume form for surfaces is exactly the surface element from vector calculus. In the case where , combining these two equations results in the expression for the magnitude of the cross product in terms of its components: The same result is found directly using the components of the cross product found from: In R, Lagrange's equation is a