HAMILTON

You had a book by Simon Altman circulating in your group for a while about quaternions and the imaginary unit "i". I wish I had that book. Altman explained that quaternions were a rotation operator that when applied to a vector in Cartesian space would act to rotate the 3-vector through a quarter rotation in 3-space.....and he explained that the imaginary unit does the same thing to the unit vector in the complex plane. There was some reason why a quarter rotation was so important in his physical theory (it was Hamilton's idea)….I tried once to follow Hamilton's quaternion theory but I gave up.....it is comprised of the unit vectors (of i, j and k) and the imaginary unit. I now forget exactly what the theory was....It was supposed to be a more general theory of motion than Newtonian mechanics. I do have a book here that I could dig up and read. I am not requesting you here to send me that book.