Symbol for elementwise multiplication of vectors
(Minor edits.)
It turns out that the symbol $\odot$ is often used to denote component-wise multiplication (a few examples are given in the comments below); $\circ$ and $*$ are common alternatives.
- Wikipedia uses $\circ$ (
\circ
) to denote the Hadamard product (which is the operation you describe) - This answer makes a
good case for $\odot$ (
\odot
) being used instead.
No, I would be concerned about $\otimes$ causing confusion with the outer product (although the outer product will produce a matrix, and the componentwise product will produce a vector, so if the context is clear enough perhaps this will not be a problem).
I recommend writing componentwise multiplication of vectors using some symbol that does not have a standard meaning, perhaps $\star$ (\star
) or $\diamond$ (\diamond
), so that people reading won't have any preconceptions about what might be meant.