> If people put in as much effort to understand quaternions as has been expended in this article, then quaternions would probably be just as easy to grasp and t

> If people put in as much effort to understand quaternions as has been expended in this article, then quaternions would probably be just as easy to grasp and the system being described. You can do anything you do with our numbers with roman numerals. You could argue that our base-10 system is as arbitrary as roman numerals, or that knowing how to do arithmetic in one system will allow you to do arithmetic in the other one. But that does not mean that learning arithmetic with roman numerals has the same difficulty as with base-10 numbers, and the only reason we find it more difficult is because we do not put enough effort. I have introduced a few grad students to quaternions and GA. We eventually use quaternions most of the time, but they do not understand quaternions until they see GA (the same as someone may need some base-10 theory before completely understanding roman numerals arithmetic).