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Quaternion
Definitions
- 1 A group or set of four people or things.
"Then wer the dayes of unlevended breed, and when he had caught hym, he put him in preson, and delyvered hym to iiij. quaternions off soudiers to be kepte, entendynge after ester to brynge hym forth to the people."
- 2 the cardinal number that is the sum of three and one wordnet
- 3 A word of four syllables.
"In his general deportment he was pompous and important, affecting a species of florid elocution, which often became ridiculous from his misarranging the triads and quaternions with which he loaded his sentences."
- 4 A type of four-dimensional hypercomplex number consisting of a real part and three imaginary parts (real multiples of distinct, independent square roots of −1 denoted by i, j and k); commonly used in vector mathematics and as an alternative to matrix algebra in calculating the rotation of three-dimensional objects.
"The right-hand side of the quaternion equation requires scalar multiplication and quaternion addition."
Etymology
From Middle English quaterniǒun, from Late Latin quaterniō, from quaternī (“four each”) + -iō, from quater (“four times”). Doublet of kern. The mathematics sense was coined by Irish mathematician and astronomer William Rowan Hamilton in 1843.
See also for "quaternion"
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Unscramble this word: quaternion