"Frango com Nata" <nomail@nomail> wrote:
> Does anyone know why POV-Ray documentation states the following?:
>
> "Of the two, the quaternions are much better known, but one can argue that
> hypercomplex numbers are more useful for our purposes, since complex valued
> functions such as sin, cos, etc. can be generalized to work for
> hypercomplex numbers in a uniform way."
>
> Long ago, I took as an exercise to write a document about the way every
> elementary function could be extended to Hamilton's quaternions, ....

Hi,

this has been discussed before, multiple times probably. I brought up the
question myself 3.5 years ago, though the thread strangely doesn't show
when you search here for "julia quaternion", see here :
http://news.povray.org/povray.general/thread/%3C3cdb6b98%40news.povray.org%3E/

The discussion then continued in personal mails between Peter Popov and me,
and the short version is:
- the original author of the quaternion stuff seems to have disappeared from
the net
- no active member (THEN, might have changed...) of the POV-team really
understands the quaternion-relevant code well enough to try to implement
new types
- there is a bug in the quaternion rendering that nobody can fix, for the
same reasons as above

>  I'm also wondering why there
> seems to be no engine capable of rendering quaternion Mandelbrot sets...

One reason might be, that the "classical" Mandelbrot sets of formulas
pow(z,n)+c should look quite boring because any 3d-cut through them
orthogonal to the real axis is just a sphere ...

Greetings

Karl

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