Origins of Hestenes' work

Subject: Re: Solving problems in special relativity w/quate
From: Pertti Lounesto <lounesto@dopey.hut.fi>
Date: 1997/04/06
Message-Id: <w0iwwqg7k9o.fsf@dopey.hut.fi>
Newsgroups: sci.physics.research
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mark@omnifest.uwm.edu (Mark Hopkins) writes:
> What you're doing is essentially redeveloping the Spacetime Algebra
> formalism of Hestenes. The earliest reference for this is the 1966
> "Spacetime Algebra", by David Hestenes.
> A more suitable framework for doing the algebraic manipulations is not
> the quaternions, but the 3+1 dimensional Clifford algebra -- the one which
> is isomorphic to the Dirac algebra.

Hestenes' "Space-Time Algebra", 1966, is a nice book. The issues you
mention were discussed already by Marcel Riesz: "Clifford Numbers and
Spinors", 1958, reprinted in a volume edited by E.F. Bolinder et al.,
Kluwer, 1993, ISBN 0-7923- 2299-1, see Zentralblatt fur Mathematik
823/1995, 15028. Riesz deals with Lorentz transformations of the
Minkowski space-time. However, it should be mentioned that rotations
of Euclidean spaces were represented by spin groups, Clifford algebras,
first by Rudolf Lipschitz 1880/1886.
--
Pertti Lounesto http://www.math.hut.fi/~lounesto