BERNW ARD JOERGES AND HELGA NOWOTNY YET ANOTHER TURN The thing that doesn't fit is the thing that's most interesting. Richard Fcynman This volume was originally conceived as a contribution to yet another 'tum', not cap tured by one of the many adjectives that have served to describe the collective meander ing of the scholarly community in search of direction, It was meant to mark the millen nial turn, a seemingly purely chronological event, but one in search for great meanings and invested with loaded significances. The editors wanted to seize the opportunity of the moment in order to pause...

BERNW ARD JOERGES AND HELGA NOWOTNY YET ANOTHER TURN The thing that doesn't fit is the thing that's most interesting. Richard Fcynman This volume was originally conceived as a contribution to yet another 'tum', not cap tured by one of the many adjectives that have served to describe the collective meander ing of the scholarly community in search of direction, It was meant to mark the millen nial turn, a seemingly purely chronological event, but one in search for great meanings and invested with loaded significances. The editors wanted to seize the opportunity of the moment in order to pause...

William Kingdon Clifford published the paper defining his "geometric algebras" in 1878, the year before his death. Clifford algebra is a generalisation to n-dimensional space of quaternions, which Hamilton used to represent scalars and vectors in real three-space: it is also a development of Grassmann's algebra, incorporating in the fundamental relations inner products defined in terms of the metric of the space. It is a strange fact that the Gibbs- Heaviside vector techniques came to dominate in scientific and technical literature, while quaternions and Clifford algebras, the true...