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Versor
In mathematics, a versor is a quaternion of norm one (a ''unit quaternion''). The word is derived from Latin ''versare'' = "to turn" with the suffix ''-or'' forming a noun from the verb (i.e. ''versor'' = "the turner"). It was introduced by William Rowan Hamilton in the context of his quaternion theory. Each versor has the form :q = \exp(a\mathbf) = \cos a + \mathbf \sin a, \quad \mathbf^2 = -1, \quad a \in ,\pi where the r2 = −1 condition means that r is a unit-length vector quaternion (or that the first component of r is zero, and the last three components of r are a unit vector in 3 dimensions). The corresponding 3-dimensional rotation has the angle 2''a'' about the axis r in axis–angle representation. In case (a right angle), then q = \mathbf, and the resulting unit vector is termed a '' right versor''. Presentation on 3- and 2-spheres Hamilton denoted the versor of a quaternion ''q'' by the symbol U''q''. He was then able to display the general quaternion in pol ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Classical Hamiltonian Quaternions
William Rowan Hamilton invented quaternions, a mathematical entity in 1843. This article describes Hamilton's original treatment of quaternions, using his notation and terms. Hamilton's treatment is more geometric than the modern approach, which emphasizes quaternions' algebraic properties. Mathematically, quaternions discussed differ from the modern definition only by the terminology which is used. Classical elements of a quaternion Hamilton defined a quaternion as the quotient of two directed lines in tri dimensional space; or, more generally, as the quotient of two vectors. A quaternion can be represented as the sum of a ''scalar'' and a ''vector''. It can also be represented as the product of its ''tensor'' and its ''versor''. Scalar Hamilton invented the term ''scalars'' for the real numbers, because they span the "scale of progression from positive to negative infinity" or because they represent the "comparison of positions upon one common scale". Hamilton regarde ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Quaternion
In mathematics, the quaternion number system extends the complex numbers. Quaternions were first described by the Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton in 1843 and applied to mechanics in three-dimensional space. Hamilton defined a quaternion as the quotient of two '' directed lines'' in a three-dimensional space, or, equivalently, as the quotient of two vectors. Multiplication of quaternions is noncommutative. Quaternions are generally represented in the form :a + b\ \mathbf i + c\ \mathbf j +d\ \mathbf k where , and are real numbers; and , and are the ''basic quaternions''. Quaternions are used in pure mathematics, but also have practical uses in applied mathematics, particularly for calculations involving three-dimensional rotations, such as in three-dimensional computer graphics, computer vision, and crystallographic texture analysis. They can be used alongside other methods of rotation, such as Euler angles and rotation matrices, or as an alternative to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Spherical Geometry
300px, A sphere with a spherical triangle on it. Spherical geometry is the geometry of the two-dimensional surface of a sphere. In this context the word "sphere" refers only to the 2-dimensional surface and other terms like "ball" or "solid sphere" are used for the surface together with its 3-dimensional interior. Long studied for its practical applications to navigation and astronomy, spherical geometry bears many similarities and relationships to, and important differences from, Euclidean plane geometry. The sphere has for the most part been studied as a part of 3-dimensional Euclidean geometry (often called solid geometry), the surface thought of as placed inside an ambient 3-d space. It can also be analyzed by "intrinsic" methods that only involve the surface itself, and do not refer to, or even assume the existence of, any surrounding space outside or inside the sphere. Because a sphere and a plane differ geometrically, (intrinsic) spherical geometry has some feat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Rowan Hamilton
Sir William Rowan Hamilton LL.D, DCL, MRIA, FRAS (3/4 August 1805 – 2 September 1865) was an Irish mathematician, astronomer, and physicist. He was the Andrews Professor of Astronomy at Trinity College Dublin, and Royal Astronomer of Ireland, living at Dunsink Observatory. Hamilton's scientific career included the study of geometrical optics, ideas from Fourier analysis, and his work on quaternions which made him one of the founders of modern linear algebra. He made major contributions in optics, classical mechanics and abstract algebra. His work was fundamental to modern theoretical physics, particularly his reformulation of Newtonian mechanics, now called Hamiltonian mechanics. It is now central both to electromagnetism and to quantum mechanics. Early life Hamilton was the fourth of nine children born to Sarah Hutton (1780–1817) and Archibald Hamilton (1778–1819),Bruno (2003) who lived in Dublin at 29 Dominick Street, later renumbered to 36. Hamilton's fath ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Plane (geometry)
In mathematics, a plane is a Euclidean ( flat), two- dimensional surface that extends indefinitely. A plane is the two-dimensional analogue of a point (zero dimensions), a line (one dimension) and three-dimensional space. Planes can arise as subspaces of some higher-dimensional space, as with one of a room's walls, infinitely extended, or they may enjoy an independent existence in their own right, as in the setting of two-dimensional Euclidean geometry. Sometimes the word ''plane'' is used more generally to describe a two-dimensional surface, for example the hyperbolic plane and elliptic plane. When working exclusively in two-dimensional Euclidean space, the definite article is used, so ''the'' plane refers to the whole space. Many fundamental tasks in mathematics, geometry, trigonometry, graph theory, and graphing are performed in a two-dimensional space, often in the plane. Euclidean geometry Euclid set forth the first great landmark of mathematical thought, a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Angle
In Euclidean geometry, an angle is the figure formed by two rays, called the '' sides'' of the angle, sharing a common endpoint, called the '' vertex'' of the angle. Angles formed by two rays lie in the plane that contains the rays. Angles are also formed by the intersection of two planes. These are called dihedral angles. Two intersecting curves may also define an angle, which is the angle of the rays lying tangent to the respective curves at their point of intersection. ''Angle'' is also used to designate the measure of an angle or of a rotation. This measure is the ratio of the length of a circular arc to its radius. In the case of a geometric angle, the arc is centered at the vertex and delimited by the sides. In the case of a rotation, the arc is centered at the center of the rotation and delimited by any other point and its image by the rotation. History and etymology The word ''angle'' comes from the Latin word ''angulus'', meaning "corner"; cognate words are ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Arc (geometry)
In mathematics, a curve (also called a curved line in older texts) is an object similar to a line, but that does not have to be straight. Intuitively, a curve may be thought of as the trace left by a moving point. This is the definition that appeared more than 2000 years ago in Euclid's ''Elements'': "The urvedline is €¦the first species of quantity, which has only one dimension, namely length, without any width nor depth, and is nothing else than the flow or run of the point which €¦will leave from its imaginary moving some vestige in length, exempt of any width." This definition of a curve has been formalized in modern mathematics as: ''A curve is the image of an interval to a topological space by a continuous function''. In some contexts, the function that defines the curve is called a ''parametrization'', and the curve is a parametric curve. In this article, these curves are sometimes called ''topological curves'' to distinguish them from more constrained curves suc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Line Segment
In geometry, a line segment is a part of a straight line that is bounded by two distinct end points, and contains every point on the line that is between its endpoints. The length of a line segment is given by the Euclidean distance between its endpoints. A closed line segment includes both endpoints, while an open line segment excludes both endpoints; a half-open line segment includes exactly one of the endpoints. In geometry, a line segment is often denoted using a line above the symbols for the two endpoints (such as \overline). Examples of line segments include the sides of a triangle or square. More generally, when both of the segment's end points are vertices of a polygon or polyhedron, the line segment is either an edge (of that polygon or polyhedron) if they are adjacent vertices, or a diagonal. When the end points both lie on a curve (such as a circle), a line segment is called a chord (of that curve). In real or complex vector spaces If ''V'' is a vector spac ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mathematics
Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics with the major subdisciplines of number theory, algebra, geometry, and analysis, respectively. There is no general consensus among mathematicians about a common definition for their academic discipline. Most mathematical activity involves the discovery of properties of abstract objects and the use of pure reason to prove them. These objects consist of either abstractions from nature orin modern mathematicsentities that are stipulated to have certain properties, called axioms. A ''proof'' consists of a succession of applications of deductive rules to already established results. These results include previously proved theorems, axioms, andin case of abstraction from naturesome basic properties that are considered true starting poin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Great Circle
In mathematics, a great circle or orthodrome is the circular intersection of a sphere and a plane passing through the sphere's center point. Any arc of a great circle is a geodesic of the sphere, so that great circles in spherical geometry are the natural analog of straight lines in Euclidean space. For any pair of distinct non- antipodal points on the sphere, there is a unique great circle passing through both. (Every great circle through any point also passes through its antipodal point, so there are infinitely many great circles through two antipodal points.) The shorter of the two great-circle arcs between two distinct points on the sphere is called the ''minor arc'', and is the shortest surface-path between them. Its arc length is the great-circle distance between the points (the intrinsic distance on a sphere), and is proportional to the measure of the central angle formed by the two points and the center of the sphere. A great circle is the largest circle that ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
24-cell
In geometry, the 24-cell is the convex regular 4-polytope (four-dimensional analogue of a Platonic solid) with Schläfli symbol . It is also called C24, or the icositetrachoron, octaplex (short for "octahedral complex"), icosatetrahedroid, octacube, hyper-diamond or polyoctahedron, being constructed of octahedral cells. The boundary of the 24-cell is composed of 24 octahedral cells with six meeting at each vertex, and three at each edge. Together they have 96 triangular faces, 96 edges, and 24 vertices. The vertex figure is a cube. The 24-cell is self-dual. It and the tesseract are the only convex regular 4-polytopes in which the edge length equals the radius. The 24-cell does not have a regular analogue in 3 dimensions. It is the only one of the six convex regular 4-polytopes which is not the four-dimensional analogue of one of the five regular Platonic solids. However, it can be seen as the analogue of a pair of irregular solids: the cuboctahedron and its dual the r ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Radian
The radian, denoted by the symbol rad, is the unit of angle in the International System of Units (SI) and is the standard unit of angular measure used in many areas of mathematics. The unit was formerly an SI supplementary unit (before that category was abolished in 1995). The radian is defined in the SI as being a dimensionless unit, with 1 rad = 1. Its symbol is accordingly often omitted, especially in mathematical writing. Definition One radian is defined as the angle subtended from the center of a circle which intercepts an arc equal in length to the radius of the circle. More generally, the magnitude in radians of a subtended angle is equal to the ratio of the arc length to the radius of the circle; that is, \theta = \frac, where is the subtended angle in radians, is arc length, and is radius. A right angle is exactly \frac radians. The rotation angle (360°) corresponding to one complete revolution is the length of the circumference divided by the radius, w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
