I got immersed in another tale from VectorVille, the place of Grassmann, Clifford, certainly Whitehead, but that's one school. Gibbs-Heaviside inherits more directly from Hamilton-Tait. And those are just a couple of the moving pieces; I'm not saying I have a total grasp of this engine. I learned a lot of new things just this morning, about Clifford in particular.
We're talking about Algebras here (in the plural) if none of that made sense. These are the superstars, and that Whitehead is the same Alfred North who worked with Bertrand Russell, another higher up among philosophers. These algebras have the property of being foundational in the sense of general. They each show off how every other algebra is an instance of what they describe.
Anyway, for all I know, the "web foot multiplication" of two and three vectors, forming a "close the lid" triangle and tetrahedron respectively (bottom and top figures), is well known as some [Borges] Algebra. I'm not a super-sleuth vs-a-vs every nook and cranny of this library see. I'm no Columbo (Wings of Desire allusion).
Why I'm talking about VectorVille, in turn, is because I was just posting to a listserv (open archive) regarding Quadrays again, what else is new, right? That's a vector algebra you only need prior exposure to XYZ to understand, and indeed I describe it as "an API to XYZ" which sort of begs the question "from where?" i.e. who is outside of XYZ enough to need an "API" into it, Martians?
I've been reading about the Vector World and its evolution more as one of those sideline journalists, following from afar, than some immersed professor, in spite of all my dabbling the Quadray architecture. I've been needing excuses to build Python muscles, and I could see the investment in Synergetics was paying off, if only in terms of getting to meet with some superstars of my generation. Standing ovation, y'all.
For those still scratching their heads, I recommend more searches, and bone up on "caltrop" as a good Scrabble word.
Speaking of Scrabble words, and Puzzle World, hats off to that world, e.g. Sodoku, Wordle and all that. Crossword puzzles, jigsaw puzzles... count me a fan, with no pretensions to being innately good at solving any of them. I confess to being a bit of a maze junky in my day, and I even innovated a fun variant, a directed graph looking thing (with bridges and tunnels).
