Introduction to Clifford's Geometric Algebra
SICE Journal of Control, Measurement, and System Integration, Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 001–011, January 2011 Introduction to Clifford’s Geometric Algebra ∗ Eckhard HITZER Abstract : Geometric algebra was initiated by W.K. Clifford over 130 years ago. It unifies all branchesof physics, and has found rich applications in robotics, signal processing, ray tracing, virtual reality, computer vision, vector field processing, tracking, geographic information systems and neural computing. This tutorial explains the basics of geometric algebra, with concrete examples of the plane, of 3D space, of spacetime, and the popular conformal model. Geometric algebras are ideal to represent geometric transformations in the general framework of Clifford groups (also called versor or Lipschitz groups). Geometric (algebra based) calculus allows, e.g., to optimize learning algorithms of Clifford neurons, etc. Key Words: Hypercomplex algebra, hypercomplex analysis, geometry, science, engineering. 1. Introduction unique associative and multilinear algebra with this property. W.K. Clifford (1845-1879), a young English Goldsmid pro- Thus if we wish to generalize methods from algebra, analysis, ff fessor of applied mathematics at the University College of Lon- calculus, di erential geometry (etc.) of real numbers, complex don, published in 1878 in the American Journal of Mathemat- numbers, and quaternion algebra to vector spaces and multivec- ics Pure and Applied a nine page long paper on Applications of tor spaces (which include additional elements representing 2D Grassmann’s Extensive Algebra. In this paper, the young ge- up to nD subspaces, i.e. plane elements up to hypervolume el- ff nius Clifford, standing on the shoulders of two giants of alge- ements), the study of Cli ord algebras becomes unavoidable.
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