Quaternion Involutions

Abstract

An involution is usually defined as a mapping that is its own inverse. In this paper, we study quaternion involutions that have the additional properties of distribution over addition and multiplication. We review formal axioms for such involutions, and we show that the quaternions have an infinite number of involutions. We show that the conjugate of a quaternion may be expressed using three mutually perpendicular involutions. We also show that any set of three mutually perpendicular quaternion involutions is closed under composition. Finally, we show that projection of a vector or quaternion can be expressed concisely using involutions.