This textbook offers an invitation to modern algebra through number systems of increasing complexity, beginning with the natural numbers and culminating with Hamilton's quaternions. Along the way, the authors carefully develop the necessary concepts and methods from abstract algebra: monoids, groups, rings, fields, and skew fields. Each chapter ends with an appendix discussing related topics from algebra and number theory, including recent developments reflecting the relevance of the material to current research. The present volume is intended for undergraduate courses in abstract algebra or elementary number theory. The inclusion of exercises with solutions also makes it suitable for self-study and accessible to anyone with an interest in modern algebra and number theory.

Ever since the Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton introduced quaternions in the nineteenth century--a feat he celebrated by carving the founding equations into a stone bridge--mathematicians and engineers have been fascinated by these mathematical objects. Today, they are used in applications as various as describing the geometry of spacetime, guiding the Space Shuttle, and developing computer applications in virtual reality. In this book, J. B. Kuipers introduces quaternions for scientists and engineers who have not encountered them before and shows how they can be used in a variety of practical situations. The book is primarily an exposition of the quaternion, a 4-tuple, and its primary application in a rotation operator. But Kuipers also presents the more conventional and familiar 3 x 3 (9-element) matrix rotation operator. These parallel presentations allow the reader to judge which approaches are preferable for specific applications. The volume is divided into three main parts. The opening chapters present introductory material and establish the book's terminology and notation. The next part presents the mathematical properties of quaternions, including quaternion algebra and geometry. It includes more advanced special topics in spherical trigonometry, along with an introduction to quaternion calculus and perturbation theory, required in many situations involving dynamics and kinematics. In the final section, Kuipers discusses state-of-the-art applications. He presents a six degree-of-freedom electromagnetic position and orientation transducer and concludes by discussing the computer graphics necessary for the development of applications in virtual reality.

This self-contained text presents a consistent description of the geometric and quaternionic treatment of rotation operators, employing methods that lead to a rigorous formulation and offering complete solutions to many illustrative problems. Geared toward upper-level undergraduates and graduate students, the book begins with chapters covering the fundamentals of symmetries, matrices, and groups, and it presents a primer on rotations and rotation matrices. Subsequent chapters explore rotations and angular momentum, tensor bases, the bilinear transformation, projective representations, and the geometry, topology, and algebra of rotations. Some familiarity with the basics of group theory is assumed, but the text assists students in developing the requisite mathematical tools as necessary.

In essence, this text is written as a challenge to others, to discover significant uses for Cayley number algebra in physics. I freely admit that though the reading of some sections would benefit from previous experience of certain topics in physics - particularly relativity and electromagnetism - generally the mathematics is not sophisticated. In fact, the mathematically sophisticated reader, may well find that in many places, the rather deliberate progress too slow for their liking. This text had its origin in a 90-minute lecture on complex numbers given by the author to prospective university students in 1994. In my attempt to develop a novel approach to the subject matter I looked at complex numbers from an entirely geometric perspective and, no doubt in line with innumerable other mathematicians, re-traced steps first taken by Hamilton and others in the early years of the nineteenth century. I even enquired into the possibility of using an alternative multiplication rule for complex numbers (in which argzlz2 = argzl- argz2) other than the one which is normally accepted (argzlz2 = argzl + argz2). Of course, my alternative was rejected because it didn't lead to a 'product' which had properties that we now accept as fundamental (i. e.

This book investigates the geometry of quaternion and octonion algebras. Following a comprehensive historical introduction, the book illuminates the special properties of 3- and 4-dimensional Euclidean spaces using quaternions, leading to enumerations of the corresponding finite groups of symmetries. The second half of the book discusses the less f

"Color image processing has involved much interest in the recent years. The use of color in image processing is motivated by the facts that 1) the human eyes can discern thousands of colors, and image processing is used both for human interaction and computer interpretation; 2) the color image comprises more information than the gray-level image; 3) the color features are robust to several image processing procedures (for example, to the translation and rotation of the regions of interest); 4) the color features are efficiently used in many vision tasks, including object recognition and tracking, image segmentation and retrieval, image registration etc.; 5) the color is necessary in many real life applications such as visual communications, multimedia systems, fashion and food industries, computer vision, entertainment, consumer electronics, production printing and proofing, digital photography, biometrics, digital artwork reproduction, industrial inspection, and biomedical applications. Finally, the enormous number of color images that constantly are uploaded into Internet require new approaches and challenges of big visual media creation, retrieval, processing, and applications. It also gives us new opportunities to create a number of big visual data-driven applications. Three independent quantities are used to describe any particular color; the human eyes are seen all colors as variable combinations of primary colors of red, green, and blue. Many methods of the modern color image processing are based on dealing out each primary color"--

Quaternion multiplication can be used to rotate vectors in three-dimensions. Therefore, in computer graphics, quaternions have three principal applications: to increase speed and reduce storage for calculations involving rotations, to avoid distortions arising from numerical inaccuracies caused by floating point computations with rotations, and to interpolate between two rotations for key frame animation. Yet while the formal algebra of quaternions is well-known in the graphics community, the derivations of the formulas for this algebra and the geometric principles underlying this algebra are not well understood. The goals of this monograph are to provide a fresh, geometric interpretation for quaternions, appropriate for contemporary computer graphics, based on mass-points; to present better ways to visualize quaternions, and the effect of quaternion multiplication on points and vectors in three dimensions using insights from the algebra and geometry of multiplication in the complex plane; to derive the formula for quaternion multiplication from first principles; to develop simple, intuitive proofs of the sandwiching formulas for rotation and reflection; to show how to apply sandwiching to compute perspective projections. In addition to these theoretical issues, we also address some computational questions. We develop straightforward formulas for converting back and forth between quaternion and matrix representations for rotations, reflections, and perspective projections, and we discuss the relative advantages and disadvantages of the quaternion and matrix representations for these transformations. Moreover, we show how to avoid distortions due to floating point computations with rotations by using unit quaternions to represent rotations. We also derive the formula for spherical linear interpolation, and we explain how to apply this formula to interpolate between two rotations for key frame animation. Finally, we explain the role of quaternions in low-dimensional Clifford algebras, and we show how to apply the Clifford algebra for R3 to model rotations, reflections, and perspective projections. To help the reader understand the concepts and formulas presented here, we have incorporated many exercises in order to clarify and elaborate some of the key points in the text. Table of Contents: Preface / Theory / Computation / Rethinking Quaternions and Clif ford Algebras / References / Further Reading / Author Biography