On the Differentiability of Quaternion Functions

Abstract

Motivated by the general problem of extending the classical theory of holomorphic functions of a complex variable to the case of quater- nion functions, we give a notion of an H-derivative for functions of one quaternion variable. We show that the elementary quaternion func- tions introduced by Hamilton as well as the quaternion logarithm function possess such a derivative. We conclude by establishing rules for calculating H-derivatives.