William Kingdon Clifford

William Kingdon Clifford was a British mathematician and philosopher. Building on the work of Hermann Grassmann, he introduced what is now termed geometric algebra. This is a special case of what later became known as the Clifford algebra, which was named in his honour. The operations of geometric algebra have the effect of mirroring, rotating, translating, and mapping the geometric objects that are being modelled to new positions. Clifford algebras in general and geometric algebra in particular have been of ever increasing importance to mathematical physics, geometry, and computing. Clifford was the first to suggest that gravitation might be a manifestation of an underlying geometry. In his philosophical writings he coined the expression mind-stuff.