3 ms·
Yeah... let's also not forget that quaterion multiplication is noncommutative (AB≠︎B A), which makes theem an absolute pain to work with. This is why it made se
by qubex 9y ago
Yeah... let's also not forget that quaterion multiplication is noncommutative (AB≠︎B A), which makes theem an absolute pain to work with. This is why it made sense to reformulate them from Maxwell’s two to ythe then-prevailing twenty. Then they got reformulated in terms of 3-vector calculus (by Heavside, whose existence and achievements I was ignorant of until just a few hours ago, courtesy of Hacker News).
- nileshtrivedi 9y agoMatrix multiplication is noncommutative too. What made quaternions so particularly painful?
- qubex 9y agoThey’re not particularly more painful than matrices (indeed you can represent quaterions as matrices, beyond their ”traditional” representation of a tuple of a scalar and a 3-vector), but there’s no point going through the pain since there’s alternative formulations of Maxwell’s laws (in terms of vectors) that are commutative and get you out of the pickle (at the expense of going from two to four equations).