ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Ternary commutator

Okay kiddo, have you ever played with blocks? Imagine you have three blocks, one red, one green, and one blue.

Now, let’s say you want to do something called the “ternary commutator”. That means you’re going to move the blocks around in a specific way.

First, take the red block and put it on top of the green block. Next, take the blue block and put it on top of the red block. Finally, take the green block and put it on top of the blue block.

Now you've done it! You’ve made a “ternary commutator”. It's called that because you switched the order of the blocks in a special way - you went through a cycle of 3 blocks, and went from one block to the next in a certain sequence.

It might not seem like a big deal when you’re just playing with blocks, but people use these sorts of sequences all the time in math and science to help solve really hard problems. Ternary commutators can be used to describe really complicated things like the movement of subatomic particles or the behavior of groups of objects in space. It's pretty neat, huh?