Introduction

This chapter states the purpose and organization of this book and describes various features of the volume.

1.1 PURPOSE OF THIS BOOK The aim of this book is to introduce geometric algebra, which recently has been attracting attention in various domains of physics and engineering. For beginners, however, describing it directly is rather difficult, so this book takes an indirect approach, which is somewhat different from the standard style. There already exist many textbooks on geometric algebra [2, 3, 4, 5, 12, 16], most of which start by stating “what geometric algebra is,” defining numerous symbols and terminologies, and listing fundamental identities and relationships among various quantities. This often gives the impression of reading a formula book, so that beginners tend to shy away from going on further. This is attributed to the fact that geometric algebra has been established through a long history of mathematics. In view of this, this book first gives separate descriptions of various algebras that constitute the background and then shows how they are finally combined to define geometric algebra.