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Quaternions cannot be understood without first understanding geometric algebra, at which point the quaternions themselves cease to be of consequence.
by James_K 2y ago
Quaternions cannot be understood without first understanding geometric algebra, at which point the quaternions themselves cease to be of consequence.
- chpatrick 2y agoThey're not that magical. Multiplication with complex numbers is a neat way to do 2D rotation and scaling. It's the same idea with multiple dimensions.
- catgary 2y agoI think this is pretty on par with telling someone they need to understand category theory if they’re playing around with Haskell/FP. I have lots of experience using quaternions in robotics/animation, but I never found geometric algebra particularly compelling - and I’ve given it several tries to sit down and read through various textbooks (and I have a PhD in Category theory/differential geometry, I don’t think it can be attributed to a skill issue with algebra or geometry).
- James_K 2y agoNotice my use of the term "understand". If you are just using from some library quaternions as a black-box, you really needn't understand anything about them, but if you want understand them it's probably easier to go through geometric algebra first. Otherwise you're basically just learning geometric algebra with half the rules missing and it makes no sense.
- barfbagginus 2y ago[dead]
- barfbagginus 2y ago[dead]