Teaching Quaternions is not Complex

dc.contributor.authorMcDonald, J.en_US
dc.date.accessioned2015-02-23T09:47:12Z
dc.date.available2015-02-23T09:47:12Z
dc.date.issued2010en_US
dc.description.abstractQuaternions are used in many fields of science and computing, but teaching them remains challenging. Students can have a great deal of trouble understanding essentially what quaternions are and how they can represent rotation matrices. In particular, the similarity transform, which actually achieves rotation, can often be baffling even after students have seen a full derivation. This paper outlines a constructive method for teaching quaternions, which allows students to build intuition about what quaternions are, and why simple multiplication is not adequate to represent a rotation. Through a set of examples, it demonstrates exactly how quaternions relate to rotation matrices, what goes wrong when qv is naively used to rotate vectors, and how the similarity transform fixes the problem.en_US
dc.description.number8en_US
dc.description.seriesinformationComputer Graphics Forumen_US
dc.description.volume29en_US
dc.identifier.doi10.1111/j.1467-8659.2010.01756.xen_US
dc.identifier.issn1467-8659en_US
dc.identifier.pages2447-2455en_US
dc.identifier.urihttps://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8659.2010.01756.xen_US
dc.publisherThe Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltden_US
dc.titleTeaching Quaternions is not Complexen_US
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