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3D visualization of a sphere and a rotation about an Euler axis (^) by an angle of In 3-dimensional space, according to Euler's rotation theorem, any rotation or sequence of rotations of a rigid body or coordinate system about a fixed point is equivalent to a single rotation by a given angle about a fixed axis (called the Euler axis) that runs through the fixed point. [6]
Such functions can be called functions of a quaternion variable just as functions of a real variable or a complex variable are called. As with complex and real analysis , it is possible to study the concepts of analyticity , holomorphy , harmonicity and conformality in the context of quaternions.
Like rotation matrices, quaternions must sometimes be renormalized due to rounding errors, to make sure that they correspond to valid rotations. The computational cost of renormalizing a quaternion, however, is much less than for normalizing a 3 × 3 matrix. Quaternions also capture the spinorial character of rotations in three dimensions.
The real quaternion 1 is the identity element. The real quaternions commute with all other quaternions, that is aq = qa for every quaternion q and every real quaternion a. In algebraic terminology this is to say that the field of real quaternions are the center of this quaternion algebra.
The quaternion formulation of the composition of two rotations R B and R A also yields directly the rotation axis and angle of the composite rotation R C = R B R A. Let the quaternion associated with a spatial rotation R is constructed from its rotation axis S and the rotation angle φ this axis. The associated quaternion is given by,
A quaternion has 4 real values: q w (the real part or the scalar part) and q x q y q z (the imaginary part). Defining the norm of the quaternion as follows: ‖ ‖ = + + + A unit quaternion satisfies: ‖ ‖ =
The quaternion can be related to the rotation vector form of the axis angle rotation by the exponential map over the quaternions, = /, where v is the rotation vector treated as a quaternion. A single multiplication by a versor, either left or right, is itself a rotation, but in four dimensions.
A rotor is an object in the geometric algebra (also called Clifford algebra) of a vector space that represents a rotation about the origin. [1] The term originated with William Kingdon Clifford, [2] in showing that the quaternion algebra is just a special case of Hermann Grassmann's "theory of extension" (Ausdehnungslehre). [3]