Octonions, like quaternions, are a relative of complex numbers. Octonions see some use in theoretical physics.
In practical terms, an octonion is simply an octuple of real numbers (α,β,γ,δ,ε,ζ,η,θ),
which we can write in the form
Addition and a multiplication is defined on the set of octonions, which generalize
their quaternionic counterparts. The main novelty this time is that the multiplication is not only not commutative, is now not even
associative (i.e. there are octonions
Octonions (and their kin) are described in far more details in this other document (with errata and addenda). Some traditional constructs, such as the exponential, carry over without too much change into the realms of octonions, but other, such as taking a square root, do not (the fact that the exponential has a closed form is a result of the author, but the fact that the exponential exists at all for octonions is known since quite a long time ago). |