HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION TO GEOMETRIC ALGEBRA

Geometric Algebra is a branch of mathematics whose development has been going on since the 19th century, mainly thanks to the studies of William Kingdon Clifford and Hermann Günther Grassmann. The work of these mathematicians has been subsequently ignored, due to the fact that they were not famous enough (Grassmann) or died at a young age (Clifford), until it was rediscovered and extended by David Orlin Hestenes in 1966. Today, it is thoroughly studied and applied, among other places, at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, Arizona University and the University of Fukui. Geometric Algebra allows an extremely compact and operationally easy rewriting of practically all of Classical, Relativistic and Quantum Physics, yielding deeper understanding of and insight to the problems approached in this way. I have started analyzing and applying Geometric Algebra to the Theory of Elasticity. In this paper, I present the historical background of Geometric Algebra and Geometric Calculus. In the poster accompanying this paper, I carry out the derivation of strain functions for a three-dimensional continuous body, following the work of Anthony Lasenby and Chris Doran of the University of Cambridge.