Visualizing More Quaternions is a sequel to Dr. Andrew J. Hanson’s first book,
Visualizing Quaternions, which appeared in 2006. This new volume develops and extends concepts that have attracted the author’s attention in the intervening 18 years, providing new insights into existing scholarship, and detailing results from Dr. Hanson’s own published and unpublished investigations relating to quaternion applications. Among the topics covered are the introduction of new approaches to depicting quaternions and their properties, applications of quaternion methods to cloud matching, including both orthographic and perspective projection problems, and orientation feature analysis for proteomics and bioinformatics. The quaternion adjugate variables are introduced to embody the nontrivial quaternion topology on the three-sphere and incorporate it into machine learning tasks. Other subjects include quaternion applications to a wide variety of problems in physics, including quantum computing, complexified quaternions in special relativity, and a detailed study of the Kleinian “ADE”
discrete groups of the ordinary two-sphere. Quaternion geometry is also incorporated into the isometric embedding of the Eguchi–Hanson gravitational instanton corresponding to the k = 1 Kleinian cyclic group.
Visualizing More Quaternions endeavors to explore novel ways of thinking about challenging problems that are relevant to a broad audience involved in a wide variety of scientific disciplines.
- Establishes basic principles for visual display of quaternions and their applications
- Explores quaternion based approaches to the matching of point cloud pairs, including approaches to data from orthographic and perspective projections
- Develops extensive applications of quaternion frames to protein orientation analysis
- Analyzes the application of quaternion methods to physics problems ranging from quantum computing to special relativity and gravitational instantons
Andrew J. Hanson Ph.D. is an Emeritus Professor of Computer Science at Indiana University. He earned a bachelor’s degree in Chemistry and Physics from Harvard University in 1966 and a PhD in Theoretical Physics from MIT under Kerson Huang in 1971. His interests range from general relativity to computer graphics, artificial intelligence, and bioinformatics; he is particularly concerned with applications of quaternions and with exploitation of higher-dimensional graphics for the visualization of complex scientific contexts such as Calabi-Yau spaces. He is the co-discoverer of the Eguchi-Hanson “gravitational instanton” Einstein metric (1978), author of Visualizing Quaternions (Elsevier, 2006), and designer of the iPhone Apps “4Dice” and “4DRoom” (2012) for interacting with four-dimensional virtual reality.
