“Visualizing Quaternions” by Andrew J. Hanson July 10th, 2009
Patrick Stein

Sunday night, I finished reading Visualizing Quaternions by Andrew J. Hanson. Unfortunately, the events of the week have kept me from writing this summary sooner. I feel like it would have been longer had I written it Monday. Alas, let’s play the cards in front of me.

This is a wonderful book. In addition to having gobs and gobs of useful content, it is a fine specimen of book design. The layout and illustrations are tremendous.

It tends to go from well-written, conversational passages that explain things in great detail to terse passages that mean nothing if you’re not a tensor-analysis whiz. But, even if you skim the parts that assume you know things you don’t, there’s still lots of book here to read.

There is even a nice appendix about Clifford algebras which folds in nicely with the complex number, quaternions, Clifford algebra posts that I’ve made here recently. If you do three-dimensional simulations or you like a good mathematical read, you should give this book a look.

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