alt Hacker News"Quaternions" definitely sounds shinier and more mysterious than "geometric algebra". Indeed I can’t immediately come up with any math term more shiny and mysterious, except maybe "transcendental", but as a concept transcendentals are much more familiar to most than quaternions.
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RobotToaster • yesterday at 3:14 PM
non-Euclidean geometry is a disappointingly boring subject.
true on the naming, but i think geometric/clifford algebra has its own mysterious aura precisely because it can be framed as "suppressed" or "overlooked".. plus it genuinely does have elegant mathematical structure backing up the hype
funny thing is quaternions had that exact same energy in the computer graphics community for years. after ken shoemake introduced them to CG in 1985, there was a long period of "why are we using euler angles like cavemen when this exists??". now quaternions are well known tooling for people in graphics and the mystique has worn off at least in that community.