#williamclifford — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #williamclifford, aggregated by home.social.
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It was rumoured that somewhere in my College lay the head of Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell and I went to the same college. I like that.
Also, and more importantly, William Clifford (1845-79). He who discovered the Clifford Algebra. He who made us think about space the modern way.
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CW: William Clifford at Highgate Cemetery
In London today to meet visiting friends. One place we went to was Highgate Cemetery.
We paid tribute to the great William K Clifford (1845-79), one of the small number of forceful 19th-century mathematicians who in stubborn determination persisted in forging a new way of thinking about space. His grave shows the passage of time, as is fair and right.
Saluting you, William Clifford. Saluting you, Hermann Grassmann.
#WilliamClifford #algebra #geometry #CliffordAlgebra
The photo was taken today at Highgate Cemetery, on my ancient phone.
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#Math #GeometricAlgebra #EricChisolmThis is an introduction to #GeometricAlgebra, an alternative to traditional #VectorAlgebra that expands on it in two ways:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1205.5935
1. In addition to scalars and vectors, it defines new objects representing subspaces of any dimension.
2. It defines a product that’s strongly motivated by #geometry and can be taken between any two objects. For example, the product of two vectors taken in a certain way represents their common plane.
This system was invented by #WilliamClifford and is more commonly known as #CliffordAlgebra. It’s actually older than the #VectorAlgebra that we use today (due to #Gibbs) and includes it as a subset. Over the years, various parts of #CliffordAlgebra have been reinvented independently by many people who found they needed it, often not realizing that all those parts belonged in one system. This suggests that Clifford had the right idea, and that #GeometricAlgebra, not the reduced version we use today, deserves to be the standard “vector algebra.” My goal in these notes is to describe #GeometricAlgebra from that standpoint and illustrate its usefulness. The notes are work in progress; I’ll keep adding new topics as I learn them myself.