QUATERNION

Quaternion

In mathematics, the quaternions are a number system that extends the complex numbers. They were first described by Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton in 1843 and applied to mechanics in three-dimensional space. A feature of quaternions is that multiplication of two quaternions is noncommutative. Hamilton defined a quaternion as the quotient of two directed lines in a three-dimensional space or equivalently as the quotient of two vectors.

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quaternion

Noun

  1. A group or set of four people or things.<ref name="COED-etym&sense"/>
  2. A word of four syllables.
  3. A four-dimensional hypercomplex number that consists of a real dimension and 3 imaginary ones (i, j, k) that are each a square root of -1. They are commonly used in vector mathematics and in calculating the rotation of three-dimensional objects.<ref name="COED-etym&sense"/>


The above text is a snippet from Wiktionary: quaternion
and as such is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

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