An Invitation to Split Quaternionic Analysis

Abstract

Six years after William Rowan Hamilton's discovery of quaternions, in 1849 James Cockle introduced the algebra of split quaternions. (He called them ``coquaternions.'') In this paper we define regular functions on split quaternions and prove two different analogues of the Cauchy-Fueter formula for these functions. In the paper "Split quaternionic analysis and the separation of the series for SL(2,R) and SL(2,C)/SL(2,R)" joint with Igor Frenkel we naturally apply the methods and formulas of quaternionic analysis to solve the problems of harmonic analysis on SL(2,R) and the imaginary Lobachevski space SL(2,C)/SL(2,R).