Octonions

From Citizendium
Revision as of 11:51, 9 May 2007 by imported>Andy Philpotts
(diff) ← Older revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Octonions are a non-commutative extension of the complex numbers. They were were first discovered by John Graves, a friend of Sir William Rowan Hamilton who first described the related quaternions. Although Hamilton offered to publicize Graves discovery, it took Arthur Cayley to rediscover and publish in 1845, for this reason octinions are also known as Cayley Numbers.

Definition & basic operations

The octinions, , are a eight-dimensional normed division algebra over the real numbers.


Properties

Applications

References