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Re:Quaternion Knowledge Graph Embeddings by ubj on Thursday April 25, 2024 @08:33AM (#40156720)
> The only real downside of them is that they seem to drive everybody to this obsession to try to truly understand them.

This. If you only want to understand *how to apply* quaternions to represent rotations, it's not too hard to learn. However, if you want to understand *why* they work, that's a totally different story.

Many of my colleagues still use Euler angles to represent rotations. I always use quaternions, and am a bit baffled why people are so averse to them.

Re:Quaternion Knowledge Graph Embeddings by noone_important on Thursday April 25, 2024 @09:25AM (#40157267)
If you have some knowledge of group theory the 'why' is pretty straight forward.

Quaternions are the generators of SU(2) which is a double covering of SO(3). The latter describes rotations in 3 dimensions. Thus you can express any rotation in 3d with quaternions.