This drive to transform difficult concepts into intuitive tools was one of the major forces that led me to develop mathematical animations for wikipedia. Quaternions aren’t magic-they are just a list of four blending values that tell you how much of each ‘fundamental’ rotation to use. By taking some blend of each of these rotations you can build any other rotation that you could possibly want. You have where you started, where you land after rotating 180 degrees about the x axis, where you land after rotating 180 degrees about the y axis, and where you land after rotating 180 degrees about the z axis. In a way, these rotations really are perpendicular to each other. After a significant amount of investigation I was able to build a mental model that was much more simple and intuitive-quaternions are made out of four parts because there are four rotations that are about as different from each other as you can possibly get. This wasn’t acceptable to me-I wanted to know why they worked the way that they did, and what they really represented. They are ‘magic mysterious hyper-dimensional imaginary numbers that can represent 3D rotations’. In computer graphics, programmers often treat them as a magical black box. Quaternions are a fantastic example of this. Mathematically there is no problem with doing algebra with objects in a higher dimensional space, but using memorized algorithms to manipulate symbols on a page is a far cry from really understanding the underlying concepts that those symbols represent. In mathematics and geometry, there are often concepts that can be difficult to build intuition about. Whenever I encountered something that I didn’t fully understand, I would poke and prod at it until I could build a gut level intuition about how it worked. They fostered an environment in which I was encouraged to make mistakes in order to fully explore a problem space, and it gave me the confidence to approach everything in my life with that mentality. They only cared whether or not I was learning. They made clear that in school, my grades weren’t important to them. It was all about creative problem solving figuring out what worked and what didn’t, and using whatever was available in clever ways. Any time I didn’t understand how something worked or something needed to be fixed, it was an opportunity to learn something new. It would be another decade before I would have the tools needed to visualize the shadows that such four dimensional geometry might project on our 3D world, starting with a humble 4D cube and ranging to the majestic 120-cell the 4D analog of the dodecahedron. The concept completely blew my mind I spent the rest of the day almost in a daze trying to picture a fourth direction extending at a right angle to the three directions I knew. The book used the analogy of beings living in a two dimensional world trying to understand the third dimension in order to convey the type of imagination required for three dimensional beings like us to visualize a fourth. My first exposure to the concept of higher dimensional space came from reading Flatland in elementary school.
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