Orthogonality in non-inner product spaces I have come across a notion of orthogonality of two vectors in a normed space not necessarily inner product space. Two vectors $x$ and $y$ in a normed space are said to be orthogonal (represented $x\perp y$) if $||x||\leq ||x+\alpha y||,$ for every $\alpha,$ a scalar. 
1) What is the rational behind the definition above? I guess, it has got something to do with minimum overlap between $x$ and $y$. 
2) Is this unique generalization of the concept of orthogonality from inner product spaces?
Thank you. 
 A: The definition you gave is called Birkhoff-James orthogonality and the intuition is the following: suppose you have $x,y\in\mathbb R^2$ and construct a triangle with sides $x$ and $y$. Now let $x$ be fixed and consider the same triangle with $-\alpha y$ instead of $y$. Observe that $||x+\alpha y||$ is the length of the third side of this triangle. If you try to write down a picture, you figure out in a moment that the condition $||x||\leq||x+\alpha y||$ can be true for all $\alpha$ iff $x$ and $y$ are orthogonal (looking at the picture, if they are not orthogonal and the inequality is true for some $\alpha$, then it is false for $-\alpha$). Birkhoff-James' orthogonality is a tentative to capture orthogonality through this geometric property.
Birkhoff-James' orthogonality is not the unique notion of orthogonality for normed space. 
Some references:
In the following paper
http://arxiv.org/pdf/0907.1813.pdf
you can find some recent very easy application of BJ's orthogonality, as well, if you go through the bibliography, some references about other notions of orthogonality are given. In particular I suggest the paper of Diminnie 
Diminnie, C.R. A new orthogonality relation for normed linear spaces, Math. Nachr. 114 (1983), 192-203
and the survey by Alonso and Benitez 
http://dmle.cindoc.csic.es/pdf/EXTRACTAMATHEMATICAE_1989_04_03_03.pdf
P.s. Bikhoff-James orthogonality is not symmetric in general. Some interesting remarks about symmetric orthogonalities can be found in the paper(s) by Partington in the bibliography of the arxiv paper cited above.
A: Concerning your follow-up question (iii) there is the following very nice result: For Birkhoff-James orthogonality 
it is easy to find examples where $y\perp x$ but 
$\left\|x\right\|/\left\|x+\alpha y\right\| > 1$ for some real $\alpha$, and so 
natural to investigate the largest such value 
$\left\|x\right\|/\left\|x+\alpha y\right\|$ over $X$. 
In "R. L. Thele, Some results on the radial projection in Banach spaces.
Proc. Amer. Math. Soc., 42(2):484--486", it is it is shown that this quantity
is exactly the Lipshitz constant for the radial projection onto the unit ball
in this norm. 
A: Well, it depends what do you need it for. You may also have a look at semi-inner-product spaces, which are natural generalizations of inner product spaces.
A: Concerning question 1: The rational is that in an inner product space $$x\perp y \Leftrightarrow \forall \alpha \in K: ||x||\leq ||x+\alpha y|| \qquad(K = \mathbb{R} \text{ or } K = \mathbb{C})$$
Now, if no inner product is available (but a norm), the idea is, to just take the right hand side as definition of orthogonality (call it $\perp_1$). 
Concerning question 2: No, there are other -non-equivalent - generalizations as well. As an example, note that in an inner product space over the reals 
$$\langle x,y \rangle = \frac{1}{4}( ||x+y||^2 - ||x-y||^2).$$
Hence $x\perp y \Leftrightarrow ||x+y|| = ||x-y||$. So the definition 
$$ x\perp_{\scriptstyle 2}\; y : \Leftrightarrow ||x+y|| = ||x-y||$$
generalizes the orthogonality from an inner product space to any normed space (over the reals).
Now let's show that $\perp_1, \perp_2$ aren't equivalent. Let $E = \mathbb{R}^2$ with norm $||(a,b)|| = \max(|a|, |b|)$. Then 
$\qquad (0,1) \perp_2 (2,1)$ but not $(0,1) \perp_1 (2,1)\quad$ (take $t=-1/4$)
$\qquad (1,1) \perp_1 (2,0)$ but not $(1,1) \perp_2 (2,0).$ 
