ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Quaternionic projective space

Dear 5-year-old friend,

Do you know what 3D space is? It’s where we live and it has three directions: up and down, right and left, and forwards and backwards.

Now, imagine there’s another type of space that mathematicians call quaternionic projective space. It’s a bit like regular 3D space, but it’s more complicated and has more directions.

Instead of just three directions, quaternionic projective space has four directions: i, j, k, and 1. These are called quaternions, which are a type of mathematical object that combine numbers and imaginary units.

Just like we can use regular 3D space to make shapes like cubes or spheres, we can use quaternionic projective space to make shapes like quaternionspheres or quaternionic ellipsoids.

It may seem a bit hard to understand, but just like how we can imagine moving around in regular 3D space, we can also move around in quaternionic projective space. We can even rotate objects and see how they look from different angles.

Overall, quaternionic projective space is a special type of mathematical space that has more directions than regular 3D space. It helps mathematicians study and understand shapes that are more complicated than what we can see in our everyday world.

I hope this helps, little friend!