Quaternions in Applied Sciences

After more than hundred years of arguments in favour and against quaternions, of exciting odysseys with new insights as well as disillusions about their usefulness the mathematical world saw in the last 40 years a burst in the application of quaternions and its generalizations in almost all disciplines that are dealing with problems in more than two dimensions. Our aim is to sketch some ideas - necessarily in a very concise and far from being exhaustive manner - which contributed to the picture of the recent development. With the help of some historical reminiscences we firstly try to draw attention to quaternions as a special case of Clifford Algebras which play the role of a unifying language in the Babylon of several different mathematical languages. Secondly, we refer to the use of quaternions as a tool for modelling problems and at the same time for simplifying the algebraic calculus in almost all applied sciences. Finally, we intend to show that quaternions in combination with classical and modern analytic methods are a powerful tool for solving concrete problems thereby giving origin to the development of Quaternionic Analysis and, more general, of Clifford Analysis

Fischer decomposition by inframonogenic functions

Let D denote the Dirac operator in the Euclidean space R^m. In this paper, we present a refinement of the biharmonic functions and at the same time an extension of the monogenic functions by considering the equation DfD=0. The solutions of this "sandwich" equation, which we call inframonogenic functions, are used to obtain a new Fischer decomposition for homogeneous polynomials in R^m.Comment: 10 pages, accepted for publication in CUBO, A Mathematical Journa

SPECIAL FUNCTIONS VERSUS ELEMENTARY FUNCTIONS IN HYPERCOMPLEX FUNCTION THEORY

In recent years special hypercomplex Appell polynomials have been introduced by several authors and their main properties have been studied by different methods and with different objectives. Like in the classical theory of Appell polynomials, their generating function is a hypercomplex exponential function. The observation that this generalized exponential function has, for example, a close relationship with Bessel functions confirmed the practical significance of such an approach to special classes of hypercomplex differentiable functions. Its usefulness for combinatorial studies has also been investigated. Moreover, an extension of those ideas led to the construction of complete sets of hypercomplex Appell polynomial sequences. Here we show how this opens the way for a more systematic study of the relation between some classes of Special Functions and Elementary Functions in Hypercomplex Function Theory

A Pascal-like triangle with quaternionic entries

In this paper we consider a Pascal-like triangle as result of the expansion of a binomial in terms of the generators e1, e2 of the non-commutative Clifford algebra Cℓ0, 2 over R. The study of various patterns in such structure and the discussion of its properties are carried out.This work was supported by Portuguese funds through the Research Centre of Mathematics of University of Minho - CMAT, and the Center of Research and Development in Mathematics and Applications - CIDMA (University of Aveiro), and the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology ("FCT -Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia"), within projects UIDB/00013/2020, UIDP/00013/2020, and UIDB/04106/2020

Quaternions in Applied Sciences

After more than hundred years of arguments in favour and against quaternions, of exciting odysseys with new insights as well as disillusions about their usefulness the mathematical world saw in the last 40 years a burst in the application of quaternions and its generalizations in almost all disciplines that are dealing with problems in more than two dimensions. Our aim is to sketch some ideas - necessarily in a very concise and far from being exhaustive manner - which contributed to the picture of the recent development. With the help of some historical reminiscences we firstly try to draw attention to quaternions as a special case of Clifford Algebras which play the role of a unifying language in the Babylon of several different mathematical languages. Secondly, we refer to the use of quaternions as a tool for modelling problems and at the same time for simplifying the algebraic calculus in almost all applied sciences. Finally, we intend to show that quaternions in combination with classical and modern analytic methods are a powerful tool for solving concrete problems thereby giving origin to the development of Quaternionic Analysis and, more general, of Clifford Analysis

Matrix approach to hypercomplex Appell polynomials

Recently the authors presented a matrix representation approach to real Appell polynomials essentially determined by a nilpotent matrix with natural number entries. It allows to consider a set of real Appell polynomials as solution of a suitable first order initial value problem. The paper aims to confirm that the unifying character of this approach can also be applied to the construction of homogeneous Appell polynomials that are solutions of a generalized Cauchy–Riemann system in Euclidean spaces of arbitrary dimension. The result contributes to the development of techniques for polynomial approximation and interpolation in non-commutative Hypercomplex Function Theories with Clifford algebras

A CAUCHY-KOWALEVSKI THEOREM FOR INFRAMONOGENIC FUNCTIONS

In this paper we prove a Cauchy-Kowalevski theorem for the functions satisfying the system ∂xf∂x = 0 (called inframonogenic functions)

Математические журналы и их интернационализация: первый португальский журнал “Jornal de sciencias mathematicas e astronomicas”

The article describes the historical place of the first Portuguese Journal “Jornal de sciencias mathematicas e astronómicas” (Teixeira´s Journal) during the development of the European mathematical community at the end of the 19th century