BIOL 5170 Study Guide - Eric W. Weisstein, Non-Abelian Group
Document Summary
Sir rowan hamilton, the creator of quaternion, is a mathematician. It is a method of describing rotations in three dimensions. Like the number i, you can define the multiplication of objects. Squaring the objects will result in the product of -1 when defining them. In example, the two numbers, j and k, have the property that j^2 = -1, and k^2 = -1. In a quaternion, the order matters because j multiply by i, does not equal to i multiply by j. Similarly for complex numbers, to define the set of quaternions, the form is in a+bi+cj+dk, where a, b, c are real numbers. The quaternion is in a non-abelian group, since the order does matter, when you multiply two elements.