BRINGING ENGINEERS TO GEOMETRIC ALGEBRA (AND VICE VERSA)	

Duane Storti -- University of Washington-Seattle, WA, USA	

This paper describes a strategic plan aimed at achieving significant adoption of geometric algebra in engineering, particularly in mechanical engineering (ME), at the university level. The target engineering audience includes three significant sub-groups: faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students. The plan includes creation and presentation of material aimed at each sub-group: a specially-designed introductory seminar aimed at generating faculty interest, a project-based class aimed at graduate students entering the research environment, and a re-imagined version of introductory mechanics (statics & dynamics) courses aimed at students in the early undergraduate years. In each case, the goal is to open with an amazing demonstration of the power of GA sufficient to inspire the willingness to listen to and engage with a brief introduction to GA basics and functionality aimed at showing how GA makes the amazing entirely plausible. At that point, the audience is hopefully ready to move on to more significant engagement with GA. This paper focuses on plans for engaging audiences of faculty and graduate students, and the plans for getting undergraduates to engage with geometric algebra will be the subject of future works. The discussion presented here includes some personal experiences on the road to developing this plan for bringing geometric algebra to MEs.