Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun Same as biquaternion, 2.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun mathematics A nonassociative extension of a quaternion.

Etymologies

Sorry, no etymologies found.

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word octonion.

Examples

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.

  • “As numbers go, the familiar real numbers — those found on the number line, like 1, π and -83.777 — just get things started. Real numbers can be paired up in a particular way to form “complex numbers,” first studied in 16th-century Italy, that behave like coordinates on a 2-D plane. Adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing is like translating and rotating positions around the plane. Complex numbers, suitably paired, form 4-D “quaternions,” discovered in 1843 by the Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton, who on the spot ecstatically chiseled the formula into Dublin’s Broome Bridge. John Graves, a lawyer friend of Hamilton’s, subsequently showed that pairs of quaternions make octonions: numbers that define coordinates in an abstract 8-D space.”

    — “The Peculiar Math That Could Underlie the Laws of Nature” (https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-octonion-math-that-could-underpin-physics-20180720/)

    July 23, 2018

  • You mean it’s not an eight-sided onion?

    July 24, 2018