John Carlos Baez on Nostr: It's amazing to think that Max Zorn, the guy with the famous lemma, died as late as ...
It's amazing to think that Max Zorn, the guy with the famous lemma, died as late as 1993. He spoke with a rasp ever since Nazi thugs battered his throat in 1933. And in 1935 he discovered a way to build the split octonions as 2×2 matrices with two scalar and two vector entries. This is called Zorn's vector-matrix algebra.
The 'split octonions' are different from the usual octonions - but they both become the same when you complexify them, that is, tensor with ℂ to switch from working with real numbers to complex numbers. The complexified octonions are sometimes called 'bioctonions', and I've learned to love them because one generation of fermions in the Standard Model is neatly captured by a pair of bioctonions. That's the same thing as a spinor in 10 dimensions!
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Published at
2026-08-28 15:57:34 UTCEvent JSON
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