[gnubison]

Strang does include that. I just checked the fourth edition, like you say you did. Scrolling down two pages to get to the first page of the table of contents, I see the heading “cosines and projections onto lines”. I navigate to that section and it explains all the logic, proof, and intuition behind the connection between angles and dot products. Please don’t spread misinformation…

[tptacek]

That's page 171, 13 dense pages into the section on orthogonality, long after he's introduced the dot product, in a section where he says, in italics, "the orthogonal case is the most important"; he gives cosines about half a page before going back to a perp b.

Nobody said Strang never mentioned cos θ --- that would be weird --- only that his sequencing doesn't treat the angle formula as fundamental, even in the section introducing it. And nobody has ever read Strang and thought projections didn't matter.