Historical question: Olympic IJ guns: IJ-1

[J]

A historical question about the IJ-1 for others around when it first appeared.

Was the name of this gun an insider pun or play on the Hamilton Quaternions (ij-1 and k) by Russian engineers and designers, or is the model name accidental (and the Izhvesk-Vostok staff really that ""unseeing", mathematically)?

Or do the quaternions have a different identification than i,j,-1, and k in cyrillic?

[kaban56]

Hats off to you sir, hats off..... What a wonderful observation!

But, the Cyrilic spelling of Izhevsk is Ижевск. All guns manufactured there were labeled with the first two letters ИЖ. This includes ИЖ-1, ИЖ-46m, ИЖ-35m etc.

The closest English way to replicate letter/sound "Ж" is either "zh" or "j". Hence common IZH or IJ labels. If this gives you pleaSure, think of the sound in the middle. In Russian, that sound is Ж. You can think of it as pleaЖure from now on.

[J]

Thanks for the linguistic insights.

It looks like the usual Russian notation of quaternions, however, is in Roman characters.

Even in "Russian", it probably still is i,j, and k.

For example, in this Russian language discussion of the quaterions, the i,j,k notation still is used for the mathematical part.

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D0 ... 0%BE%D0%BD

Perhaps this would favor the "insider joke" status for the IJ-1, and perhaps all of the later IJ-(x) model numbers.

[kaban56]

Should we apply for a research grant? Clearly this needs to be purchased as the basis http://www.egun.de/market/item.php?id=5227782 Something worth exploring! We can even co-author a paper on the subject: "Algebra of free pistol"

[J]

One nugget that has cropped up in the discussions on this (some by PMs), is that it would be worth a quick look at the Russian language wikipedia article on quaternions. This contains an animated graphic representation of the quaternion system, and may illustrate why it is so relevant to gun design.

A major factor in (hand)gun accuracy is the acoustic vibration pattern of the gun and its harmonics. This is very difficult to calculate even now using x,y,z,t (or 3-d force + time) coordinates and was impossible in 1960 when the IJ-1 appeared. It can become simpler in an i,j,k,-1 renormalization centered on the center of intertia or center of mass of the firearm system.

While the original advertising and manuals for the IJ-1 used cyrillic letters, it would seem odd to me, if a Russian engineer or mathematician missed the link with the quaternions. But perhaps, they all did and it isn't an inside joke after all. This just seemed all too similar to the inside jokes at Skunkworks, where advanced prototypes would be placed on display in plain sight at public entrances, as art objects or sculptures as if they were non-functional trash.

Here is the link to the interesting illustration in the Russian language article on quaternions:

https://ru.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Кватерн ... al-xyz.gif

which unfortunately needs to be copied and pasted to work.

Perhaps more if MIT can indeed host a day of target gun discussions and usage in March or April.

[Leon]

Maybe ease off on the eggnog now.... :)