Abstract
Quaternions were invented by the Irish mathematician Sir William Rowan Hamilton (1805–1865) in 1843. Sir William was looking for a way to represent complex numbers in higher dimensions, and it took 15 years of toil before he stumbled upon the idea of using a 4D notation—hence the name ‘quaternion’. Although a quaternion is a hyper-complex number, it does have a matrix form, which is derived in this chapter.
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© 2012 Springer-Verlag London
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Vince, J. (2012). Quaternions. In: Matrix Transforms for Computer Games and Animation. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-4321-5_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-4321-5_7
Publisher Name: Springer, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-4471-4320-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-4471-4321-5
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