Are these titles then the wrong avenue for learning math? Projective Geometric Algebra: Illuminated (2024) (Not mentioned directly in the article [1]; including a quote from link [2].) Algebraic Calculus (2016) Divine Proportions: Rational Trigonometry to Universal Geometry (2005) [1] https://terathon.com/blog/poor-foundations-ga.html [2] "If you want solid foundations, this book is for you."
The case against geometric algebra (2024)
81–90 of 148 posts
Re: The case against geometric algebra (2024)
#82I don't know about the rest of the article—I'm not a mathematician—but I certainly enjoying using GA a lot more compared to linear algebra, I find it way more intuitive and being able to visualize intermediate products on my rig is like a super power.
Re: The case against geometric algebra (2024)
#83It's a very fun framework when you're learning it. It constantly feels like you're learning something extremely profound and useful, but I've also found that feeling to be a bit of a mirage. Despite trying many times to make greater use of it, I've found that it often just makes a lot of actual physics work less clear, and with very little practical benefit. There's times where it affords quite pretty notation, but o…
Maybe that's why I've found it so useful when doing rigging for animation—that's the entire job!
Re: The case against geometric algebra (2024)
#84I tried to solve some engineering problems with PGA few years ago. Seemed to work OK up to a point, and at least for me was easier to approach than say Lie algebra or differential geometry. TFA denigrates papers and websites that are "non-theoretical" or "trivial". As a user of the formalisms, these kinds of materials are exactly what I need. I don't care about proofs or theoretically problematic corner cases that "r…
> I did hit a wall quite soon with GA can you give an example of what's impossible/hard to do?
I can't really say if the problem was with me or GA. Probably more like GA didn't end up providing tools for my level of math skills to solve the problem. But neither did the the traditional branches.
Re: The case against geometric algebra (2024)
#85Are these titles then the wrong avenue for learning math? Projective Geometric Algebra: Illuminated (2024) (Not mentioned directly in the article [1]; including a quote from link [2].) Algebraic Calculus (2016) Divine Proportions: Rational Trigonometry to Universal Geometry (2005) [1] https://terathon.com/blog/poor-foundations-ga.html [2] "If you want solid foundations, this book is for you."
There are two reasons for this:
(1) Popular materials are usually popular for a reason: they reflect an approximate consensus, across a significant fraction of the mathematical community, that their approaches are more-or-less the best.
(2) If you learn the same way everyone else does, you'll have an easier time talking to others and finding materials on the internet.
I know some very innovative books which I highly recommend, for example Visual Group Theory by Nathan Carter:
https://bookstore.ams.org/clrm-32/
But the innovation is pedagogical, in what Carter chooses to emphasize and how he presents everything. At the book's core, Carter agrees with everyone else about what the foundations of group theory are and should be.
Even Sheldon Axler's Linear Algebra Done Right (another excellent book), with its hilariously provocative title, only differs in its choice of emphasis and order of presentation. His choices are quite compatible with everyone else's.
Re: The case against geometric algebra (2024)
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
What interests a mathematician isn't 100% the same as what interests the physicist. All I'm saying is there is some math there that's interesting and people should see it once for the math.
And then there are us engineers. I don't care much either way whether Maxwell's equations are ∇F = J or some other form, as long as it makes the problem easier to solve. If I were in the GA Marketing Committee I'd publish a paper with suitably hand-picked worked examples where the vector approach is long and tedious, and GA version is short and sweet.
Re: The case against geometric algebra (2024)
#87The part in this that I most question / deviate from is what I've quoted below about having distinctions (syntactically?) between objects and operations. Conceptually, it's a good distinction. But is it so clearly wise to bake in that distinction into the formal framework when doing calculations or proof? > Most of the time we think of complex numbers as vectors in R2 or as rotation+scaling operators, but rarely do w…
In physics, values have units too. Analogously, you could say - why incorporate units into the algebra in physics (as is often done)? Why not just add scalars etc. and not bother carrying around the units everywhere?
Well, because doing anything else is mostly nonsensical - it does not make sense to add meters and seconds together. Using unit algebra is the most basic sanity check as to whether your formula makes any sense.
Sometimes it makes sense to convert/cast between representations, but that should be explicit - distinguishing eg. objects and operations is more readable and more safe, and only comes with a bit of notational overhead. Nothing is free, but I think the benefits far outweigh the downsides.
Re: The case against geometric algebra (2024)
#88Comparison of vector algebra and geometric algebra - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_vector_algebra_a...
Re: The case against geometric algebra (2024)
#89The author has completely failed to understand the meaning and the purpose of geometric algebras, though to be fair this is not entirely the author's fault, because there are a lot of bad presentations of the geometric algebra theory, many of which contain actual mathematical mistakes, as listed in an article by Eric Lengyel that is linked in the parent article.
The main correct criticism of the parent article is that the geometric product is an operation that is seldom useful in practice.
In practice, the important operations are the generalizations of the inner product and of the outer product. The inner product and the outer product have been defined by Hermann Grassmann in the 19th century and the publications of Grassmann together with the theory of quaternions by Hamilton have been the sources on which William Kingdon Clifford has created the theory of geometric algebras.
Unfortunately, today a lot of people use incorrectly the term "outer product", using it to name the product defined by Johann Georg Zehfuss, which is also called "tensor product". "Tensor product" is also not a really appropriate term, but at least it is not as ambiguous as "outer product" has become, so it should always be preferred for the Zehfuss product. For the outer product in the Grassmann sense, a non-ambiguous term is "wedge product" though it is rather meaningless.
While the geometric product does not have a practical importance, it has a great theoretical importance, because with it the geometric algebras can be defined with a small set of simple and natural axioms. Then the operations that are important in practice, i.e. the generalized inner and outer (wedge) products can be defined based on the geometric product.
The author is right that some geometric algebra proponents have tried to shoehorn the use of the geometric product in some applications for which it is not the right tool, but that has nothing to do with the theory of geometric algebras.
The theory of geometric algebras has a modest practical importance, but it has an immense theoretical importance, because it unifies many mathematical concepts that previously seemed to be unrelated and it illuminates the relationships between them and also the distinctions between things that were previously confused, even by the best mathematicians and physicists, for more than a century.
There is a high probability that the progress of physics has been delayed by many decades by the fact that both William Clifford and James Clerk Maxwell have died prematurely and almost simultaneously, before they could make order, based on the theory of geometric algebras, in the mess that was at that time the theory of vectors, complex numbers and quaternions. After their death, the theory of geometric algebras has been forgotten and a lot of mistaken theories of vectors have been created, by Josiah Willard Gibbs, Oliver Heaviside and others (because they did not understand the relationships between various physical quantities, like polar vectors, axial vectors, quaternions, complex numbers, pseudoscalars).
When I have first encountered the theory of geometric algebras, that was one of the most beautiful moments in my experience of learning mathematics, it was like turning the light on in a dark room full of previously hidden things. The only similar moments, have been when learning for the first time projective geometry, the theory of spatial symmetry groups and certain parts of topology, which are also theories that have unified a great number of seemingly unrelated concepts.
Like I have said, geometric algebras have very little importance for writing algorithms or the like, where the classic linear algebra with matrices is what matters most, but anyone who does not understand geometric algebras does not really understand physics and this lack of understanding will prevent the correct solution of many problems.
Re: The case against geometric algebra (2024)
#90Not a fan of the article. It resorts to ad hominem attacks like > GA had gotten a bad reputation because of its tendency to attract bad mathematicians and full-on crackpots. Hestenes honestly sounds like one a lot of the time, and I’m not really sure whether he is or isn’t. It makes sense, really. > GA ended up appealing to a lot of fringes: people who only had undergraduate degrees, people who had dropped out of PhD…
Only tangenially relevant, but the exagerrated differentiation of universities, and levels of education (e.g. PhD vs. not) has always been bothering me. I only have experience in a different field (CS), and yes, those things can be indicators, but I've experienced so many outliers in both directions to know that degrees need to be taken with more than just a grain of salt.
* Physical sciences also have a lot of diversity, but at least you can go to their labs and see their equipment, reagents, data, etc cetera.