Introduction

This chapter provides a brief overview of this volume, showing that this book can be used for a variety of ways and can be used to assist the reader toward a better understanding of quaternion linear algebra. Quaternions after all have become increasingly useful for practitioners in research, both in theory and applications. For example, a significant number of research papers on quaternions, perhaps even most of them, appear regularly in mathematical physics journals, and quantum mechanics based on quaternion analysis is mainstream physics. In engineering, quaternions are often used in control systems, and in computer science they play a role in computer graphics. Quaternion formalism is also used in studies of molecular symmetry. Hence, to give the reader a preliminary understanding of quaternions, this chapter also provides some notations and conventions to be used in the remainder of this volume, as well as some standard matrices.