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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]
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.
A direct formula for the conversion from a quaternion to Euler angles in any of the 12 possible sequences exists. [2] For the rest of this section, the formula for the sequence Body 3-2-1 will be shown. If the quaternion is properly normalized, the Euler angles can be obtained from the quaternions via the relations:
Now every quaternion component appears multiplied by two in a term of degree two, and if all such terms are zero what is left is an identity matrix. This leads to an efficient, robust conversion from any quaternion – whether unit or non-unit – to a 3 × 3 rotation matrix. Given:
which is a quaternion of unit length (or versor) since ‖ ‖ = + + + = Most importantly, the above equations for composition of rotations are precisely the equations for multiplication of quaternions =. In other words, the group of unit quaternions with multiplication, modulo the negative sign, is isomorphic to the group of rotations with ...
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.
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.
Comment: The proof of Euler's four-square identity is by simple algebraic evaluation. Quaternions derive from the four-square identity, which can be written as the product of two inner products of 4-dimensional vectors, yielding again an inner product of 4-dimensional vectors: (a·a)(b·b) = (a×b)·(a×b).