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Despite its counter-culture status, the octonions have long drawn the curiosity of generations of physicists. The algebra is known to appear without warning in apparently disparate areas of mathematics, within algebra, geometry, and topology. However, despite its ubiquity, its practical uses in physics have remained elusive, due to the algebra's non-associativity, which must be handled with care.

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More quotes by Cohl Furey

Accordions are the octonions of the music world — tragically misunderstood.

I realized that the eight degrees of freedom of the octonions could correspond to one generation of particles: one neutrino, one electron, three up quarks and three down quarks.

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