this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2025
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The fun starts when you study quaternions
i^2 = j^2 = k^2 = ijk = −1This can't be real
They're actually very useful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternion
(...I think you may have gotten whooshed...)
Hehe, maybe a little, but wanted to share just in case someone didn't know :3
I clicked your link, I barely made it out of highschool so I have no idea what any of it means, but I like reading things I shouldn't understand anyway, sometines it's so interesting even without understanding.
So I thank you!
Quaternions are the closest we get to lovecraftian horror in real life.
Four dimensional and mostly imaginary, they were carved into a stone bridge by a crazy mathematician in a fit of madness, Lord Kelvin called them "unmixed evil", and the Mad Hatter from Alice may have been inspired by them.
Also they have been a curiosity at best for a long time, despite the efforts of a ~~secret~~ Quaternion Society, but they suddenly blew up in usefulness in modern times as they happen to be an easy and fast way for computers to describe rotations in 3D space, so they're everywhere.
Yeah, lovecraftian as shit.
It gets worse actually. You can define a number system using any power of 2 amount of i-like units in a similar relationship to quaternions using the Cayley-Dickson construction
Fascinatingly, you lose some property of the algebra at each step. Quaternions aren't commutative: ABC != CBA. Octonians aren't associative: (AB)C != A(BC). Once you get into 16 i's with subscripts, it really gets crazy.
(Also, I just got the joke. Damnit @HappyFrog@lemmy.blahaj.zone your serious answer threw me off!)
Hehe, yeah, the joke was too good :P
Maybe a bit too complex for its own good.
this isn't real