Re: [Axiom-developer] RE: learning in public

[root]

BF,

I just picked up a book "Clifford (Geometric) Algebras with applications
in Physics, Mathematics, and Engineering" today. It is 33 chapters and
somewhat unreadably dense in some areas. I have several other books to
work thru in order to get familiar with the ideas and issues before
even thinking about an implementation. You know the math and I know
Axiom so I figure we can "meet in the middle". But I have much to learn
before I can hold an intelligent conversation with you on the subject.

Bill has put up a wiki and I've been pondering ways of using it to
document Axiom and math. I've decided that I can write down the steps
I take to develop the expertise in Clifford algebras as an experiment.
Web page development is mildly tedious and I'd rather work in TeX but
until I try to fully use the wiki tool I can't really suggest alternatives.
Ideally there would be a latex<->html mapping so I can push the web pages
back into pamphlet format but I don't know how to do this yet. Anyway
I've decided to make my ignorance public and inflict it on the world :-)

I see tiny pieces of work in Axiom that are related, like Quaternions and
Denavit-Hartenburg matricies (4x4 transformation matrices). Axiom doesn't
(yet) have the category "algebra" from which a Clifford algebra would
derive. I suspect that getting educated in this subject is going to 
force an fair-sized enlargement of Axiom's category structure.

I picked up a couple online papers from 
http://carol.wins.uva.nl/~leo/clifford
These are probably part of the "geometric algebra" view of the world
but I'm such a novice that I can't yet distinguish the various 
intellectual branches of the subject.

Anyway, this should be fun.

t