28 Nov
2007
28 Nov
'07
3:04 p.m.
On Nov 27, 2007 12:11 PM, Fred lunnon <fred.lunnon@gmail.com> wrote:
On 11/27/07, metaweta@gmail.com <metaweta@gmail.com> wrote:
A relevant link:
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/square.root.html -- Mike Stay
I've read this webpage three times, and I still don't understand it. He seems to be attempting to reconstruct the Cayley-Hamilton derivation of the quaternions, which extends the complex numbers via a new element j such that j^{-1} i j = -i; but since he never states exactly how his new element k is supposed to act on i, it's hard to be sure.
Well, he says explicitly that it's not the quaternions. I won't ruin the puzzle by saying what it is, though. -- Mike Stay metaweta@gmail.com http://math.ucr.edu/~mike