In mathematics, a Clifford algebra is an algebra generated by a vector space with a quadratic form, and is a unital associative algebra. As -algebras, they generalize the real numbers, complex numbers, quaternions and several other hypercomplex number systems. The theory of Clifford algebras is intimately connected with the theory of quadratic forms and orthogonal transformations. Clifford algebras have important applications in a variety of fields including geometry, theoretical physics and digital image processing. They are named after the English mathematician William Kingdon Clifford (1845 – 1879 ) . The most familiar Clifford algebras, the orthogonal Clifford algebras, are also referred to as (pseudo-)Riemannian Clifford algebras, as distinct from symplectic Clifford algebras. Introduction and basic properties A Clifford algebra is a unital associative algebra that contains and is generated by a vector space over a field , where is equipped with a quadratic form . The Clifford algebra is the "freest" unital associative algebra generated by subject to the condition where the product on the left is that of the algebra, and the is its multiplicative identity. The idea of being the "freest" or "most general" algebra subject to this identity can be formally expressed through the notion of a universal property, as done below. Where is a finite-dimensional real vector space and is nondegenerate, may be identified by the label , indicating that has an orthogonal basis with elements with , with , and where indicates that this is a Clifford algebra over the reals; i.e. coefficients of elements of the algebra are real numbers. This basis may be found by orthogonal diagonalization. The free algebra generated by may be written as the tensor algebra , that is, the direct sum of the tensor product of copies of over all . Therefore one obtains a Clifford algebra as the quotient of this tensor algebra by the two-sided ideal generated by elements of the form for all elements . The product induced by the tensor product in the quotient algebra is written using juxtaposition (e.g. ). Its associativity follows from the associativity of the tensor product. The Clifford algebra has a distinguished subspace , being the image of the embedding map. Such a subspace cannot in general be uniquely determined given only a -algebra isomorphic to the Clifford algebra. If the characteristic of the ground field is not , then one can rewrite the fundamental identity above in the form