English

An alternate Cayley-Dickson product

Rings and Algebras 2020-01-14 v3

Abstract

Although the Cayley-Dickson algebras are twisted group algebras, little attention has been paid to the nature of the Cayley-Dickson twist. One reason is that the twist appears to be highly chaotic and there are other interesting things about the algebras to focus attention upon. However, if one uses a doubling product for the algebras different from yet equivalent to the ones commonly used and if one uses a numbering of the basis vectors different from the standard basis a quite beautiful and highly periodic twist emerges. This leads easily to a simple closed form formula for the product of any two basis vectors of a Cayley-Dickson algebra.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1602.02317,
  title  = {An alternate Cayley-Dickson product},
  author = {John Wayland Bales},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1602.02317},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

This doubling product does not produce the octonions from the quaternions, but produces an eight dimensional algebra with zero divisors

R2 v1 2026-06-22T12:44:51.258Z