Advanced Bash tutorial

[Doug]

Hello Jay:

Cool.  Quaternions were mentioned once in one math book where they
were talking about who was the person smoking crack that came up with
the idea for curl [it was Gauss who first spotted them, because Gauss
was like that, then Hamilton and Rodrigues who came up with them
independently of each other].  I still have to write out curl using
those three rows:

i j k
d/dx d/dy d/dz
f g h

It still looks like a mirage.  This math widget is what makes spinning
bike tires and EM so hard to understand.

I met one time with an Indian guy who looks for bright people to work
on math modeling for investors, as direct a link between math and
money as you will ever find.  It was clear to me that if this guy were
to offer me a job, I'd be parking the Lexus in a different gated
community.  He had not heard or worked with quaternions, which do play
a roll, tilt and yawl for game developers and rocket scientists.  So I
asked how much a part do complex numbers play.  He said none.  I was
surprised, and knew my obscure skill would be of no value to him or
his firm.  So complex numbers don't live on Wall Street, a mistake in
my opinion.

A great book on complex numbers is "Visual Complex Analysis" by
Tristan Needham.  Sometime in the next year I intended to mine that
book for little bits of algebra to animate.  This often requires
making another small program.  There was a calculation I wanted to do
where I wanted to make sure every z was equal to zero.  It took three
functions I had written earlier piped together to do it so I didn't
have to write a new one.

doug

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