Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Questions for mathematicians out here.

Is there such a thing as quaternion analysis -- calculus of functions from quaternions to quaternions.

What would be their key theorems ? What would be the analogue of conformal mappings, if any ?

Any book recommendations would be gratefully appreciated.



Conformal mappings are not nearly as rich in >2 dimensions. There is a much stronger rigidity constraint and you end up limited to just Möbius transformations. The 2 dimensional case is special.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liouville's_theorem_(conformal...


Yes of course, but I am curious about any interesting structures that functions from quaternion to quaternion may possess. I used conformal mapping as an example of an interesting structure. I could have used Cauchy Riemann as another example.


You're probably looking for something like Sudbery 1977,

https://dougsweetser.github.io/Q/Stuff/pdfs/Quaternionic-ana...

(published 1979, doi: 10.1017/S0305004100055638)


Fantastic. Thanks for the reference.



Thanks a bunch


A quaternion encodes uniform scaling + rotation. The logarithm of a quaternion is its axis-angle-nepers form, and vice versa.

    quat = sqrt( exp( nepers + radians * <axis> ) )
So I think with this exponential map, the rest of its calculus can be extended from that.


Heard the word 'nepers' after many decades. Are you by any chance an Electrical major ?

Thanks for your comment. To be fair, I had not done due diligence before asking. There's a Wikipedia pages on quaternion calculus.

Complex analysis (calculus on functions from 2D rotations to 2D rotations) is beautiful -- Once differentiability guarantees infinite differentiability. Wondering what would the analogue of that be for quaternions




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: