The pair of lines whose direction cosines are given by the two equations above are:
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If n = 0 you find quite quickly that all the direction cosines are 0 and it is impossible to determine a line. So let's assume that n = 0 .
Since the difference between direction numbers and direction cosines is a numerical factor, and both equation are homogeneous, we can use the given equations to find a triple of direction numbers, say L , M , N with N = 0 .
We can arbitrarily choose N = 1 and use the equations to find the other two direction numbers. We have
3 L + M + 5 = 0 … ( 1 )
6 M − 2 L + 5 L M = 0 … ( 2 )
It is not hard to use (1) to eliminate M from (2) leading to
L 2 + 3 L + 2 = 0
and so L = − 2 or L = − 1
Using (1) we then see that the two possible trios of direction numbers are
a = ( − 2 , 1 , 1 )
b = ( − 1 , − 2 , 1 )
And so the cosine of the angle between the two lines is
a . a × b . b a . b = 6 1