1. Introduction
Ordinary complex multiplication has geometric visualization as a superposition of a movement on a circle and the alternation between two concentric circles. In the analogous three-dimensional complex structure, circles are replaced with Euclidean spheres. The resulting complex structure is called static in the context of this work because a change in the radius variable does not lead to a change in the shape of the sphere. In this sense, concentric spheres can be viewed as parallel. If, however, the Euclidean norm that generates the spherical surfaces is replaced by an inhomogeneous functional, a dynamic three-dimensional complex structure will be achieved.
Multiplication in three-dimensional generalized complex structures, as studied in [
1,
2], can be interpreted as changing two radius variables and one angle variable. But, in these papers, the product is not primarily defined in a geometric way by distinguishing generalized spheres in the entire space, but by determining the value of the product for the so-called basis elements. In contrast, here, in the spirit of [
3], we used generalized spheres to define multiplication by changes in one radius variable and two angle variables.
To become more specific, let
denote three positive real numbers and
is a functional that plays a fundamental role in defining the density of the three-dimensional
p-generalized Gaussian probability law. With regard to the large variety of multivariate probability distributions, which could justify the introduction of numerous other functionals and in turn other complex number systems, we refer to [
4,
5,
6,
7,
8,
9,
10,
11,
12,
13,
14,
15,
16,
17,
18,
19]. We call
the
p-ball, which is a star-shaped set with respect to the origin
, its boundary
the
p-sphere of
p-radius
, and
and
the unit
p-ball and unit
p-sphere, respectively.
If
, then the functional
is positively homogeneous of degree
, that is
. In other words:
S and
are “parallel”, meaning that a change in
p-radius
r does not change the “shape” of the sphere. This situation is a static structure. If, in particular,
, then the
p-ball
B is convex and its generating functional
is a norm, but if
, then
B is radially concave in every sector of a suitably defined fan and
is an antinorm according to [
20]. Three complex numbers in case
are dealt with in [
3].
Throughout this paper, however, we always consider the case
This situation is a dynamic structure because
and
have different “shapes” if
. The functional
is not homogeneous in any degree with respect to scalars, but it is matrix homogeneous in the sense
where
is a diagonal matrix. A two-dimensional dynamic structure was studied in [
21].
From the author’s perspective of probability theory, a natural application of the number system can be constructed here for the analysis of certain invariant probability densities where generalized uniform distributions on generalized spheres, geometric measure representations and dynamic ball numbers play a role. For the convenience of the reader, several of these statements are provided from various sources to complete the picture. The reader may have their own application of dynamic structures in mind.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. The new
-complex structure including the corresponding trigonometric Euler-type formulae is introduced in
Section 2, invariant probability densities are considered in
Section 3,
Section 4 deals with generalized uniform distributions on generalized spheres and dynamic measure disintegration before
Section 5 looks at dynamic ball numbers, and a discussion in
Section 6 finishes the paper. In the
Appendix A, we quote some functions from the literature that could be used as a starting point for the construction of alternative generalized complex number systems.
3. Invariant Probability Densities
It is well-known that a function
that is defined in
is said to be invariant with respect to transformation
if it satisfies the equation
Definition 7. A probability density defined in is called -spherical if it is of the formwhere the function is a density generating function satisfyingand is a normalizing constant. Proposition 1. If ϕ is a -spherical probability density then it has in accordance with Remark 1 the invariance property which says that, for every , Remark 6. This property of -spherical probability densities may be the basis for testing a statistical hypothesis on the -sphericity of a probability density because it does not refer in any way to whether the tails of this distribution are heavy or light. To this end, let us be provide a disjoint partitioning of size N of the sphere S and the relative frequency distribution over , which comes from a sample of values , where the elements z follow the density function ϕ. Then, a first rough test for the spherical distribution of z consists of visually comparing the relative frequency distributions of the values before and after multiplicative transformation of all sample elements z with a fixed element from S. A wide range of mathematical statistic techniques can be applied to refine this test and to equip it with sophisticated mathematical properties.
Example 5. The Kotz-type density generating function with parameters of β and γ from and isand the corresponding -spherical probability density iswith Elements from the corresponding class of probability distributions are considered light-tailed distributions and the following ones are considered heavy-tailed distributions. In this and the next example, the calculation of the constant is achieved by integrating the density generating function g.
Example 6. The Pearson Type VII density generating function with parameters of and isand the corresponding -spherical probability density iswhere 4. Generalized Uniform Distribution on the Sphere S and Dynamic Geometric Disintegration of the Lebesgue Measure in
Let
denote the Borel-
field in
,
is the Lebesgue measure on
,
is a probability space and
is a random vector, that is a
-measurable function. We assume that the random vector
X is uniformly distributed on
B,
and define a non-negative random variable and a random vector taking values in
S by
respectively. For
, we call
a
-transformed central projection cone and
the corresponding
-transformed ball sector generated by
A, respectively. We denote the volume of such a sector
and define the
-spherical or functional
-related surface content of
as
In the case
not being under consideration here, this notion coincides with the Euclidean surface content measure. Note that
with
and
Example 7. The volume of the p-ball satisfies Example 8. The dual surface content measure of the generalized sphere S satisfieswhere means the multi Beta function. Definition 8. The probability lawis called the functional -related or -spherical uniform distribution on . Note that the random vector
U follow this distribution,
, is stochastically independent of the random variable
R, and the probability density of
R is
Moreover, if any random variable
follows density
f in (
4) and any random vector
satisfies
, then
is uniformly distributed on the unit
p-ball
B. The following theorem is proven analogously to Theorem 1 in [
21] and using (7) in [
19].
Theorem 4. If h is integrable over a Borel set A, thenwhereand The following result extends formula (7) in [
21] to being three-dimensional.
Corollary 1. If A has finite volume, then the Lebesgue measure of A satisfies the dynamic geometric disintegration formulawhereis the -spherical dynamical intersection proportion function (ipf) of the set A. Note that the shape of
changes if the
p-radius
r changes (unless
p has exclusively equal components). The representation of
given in this corollary may be understood as a generalization of Cavalieri’s and Torricelli’s method of indivisibles, where the indivisibles are the sets
For more details on the generalized methods of indivisibles, we refer to [
32,
33,
34]. In [
32], the classical method of Cavalieri and Torricelli has been generalized to a multidimensional situation in which the measure is not the ordinary volume or Gaussian measure. For so-called moderate or large deviation areas whose distance from the origin approaches infinity, it is shown how their Gaussian content essentially depends on their properties in the neighborhood of the point on the surface of the area that is closest to the origin. The surface content of subsets of spheres plays a crucial role in describing these properties and is essentially expressed by the properties of a function that later received the name intersection percentage function or intersection proportion function. The latter function is, in turn, closely linked to another function that was later called the sector function. The application of the classic method of Cavalieri and Toricelli was often very successful, but in certain cases it was also fraught with contradictions. The constructive role of Fubini’s theorem in this regard was discussed and the resulting geometric measure representation of the generalized method of indivisibles was subsequently applied to various probabilistic and statistical problems. For example, statements that applied to Gaussian populations were extended to general spherical populations in [
33], analogies about exponentially distributed populations were derived, and exact distribution statements in non-linear models were made possible. A geometric-measure theoretic approach to the so-called skew normal distribution in [
34] allowed to unify several known representations of this distribution from a geometric point of view and to generalize these results for spherically distributed sample vectors. An extension of such results to general norm contoured two-dimensional populations is possible on the basis of some later results.
5. The -Ball and Sector Number Functions
If density level sets of probability laws are
p-spheres, that is spheres with respect to the functional
, then a factorial component of normalizing constants is the so-called ball numbers. The general connection between measure theory and geometry behind this statement was developed in several steps. In [
15], it is said that the ratios
and
did not depend on the radius
r and their constant values agreed, where
denotes a
p-generalized
n-dimensional ellipsoid,
is the elliptic ball of the elliptic radius
r enclosed by it, and
is the suitably defined non-Euclidean surface content. In several papers, it was shown what influence generalized circle numbers had on the normalization constants of general norm contoured distributions in
Because the ball number function agreed with the suitably defined non-Euclidean surface content divided by dimension
n, the primary influence of the surface content on the normalizing constant is shown as an alternative. This is the case, for example, in [
16,
19,
35]. The dynamic, matrix-homogeneous situation was treated for the first time in a two-dimensional case in [
21].
Remark 7. It follows from the above results thatwhereObviously, these equations generalize the well-known properties of the circle number π, both in terms of the dimension of the circle or sphere and its generalized shape. Definition 9. The number is called the ball number of the p-sphere S and the function is called the p-ball number function in .
Remark 8. Let and where . Because the equationshold true for every fixed p, the function is called the S-sector number function. 6. Discussion and Conclusions
The geometric method used in the present work is a further development of the geometric method established in [
3]. The latter should therefore be additionally illustrated here in order to subsequently deepen our understanding of the present approach. The vector-valued product introduced in [
3], formula (12), for the homogeneous Euclidean case can be rewritten in the notation as
The real numbers
and
satisfied the equation
and could therefore be interpreted as the cosine and sine of an angle
respectively. With the rotation matrix
and the unit vector
, the vector
also had the structure of a unit vector and could therefore be written with an angle
as
With
, this resulted in the representation
which in turn is reminiscent of the use of ordinary spherical coordinates.
Using
p-generalized spherical coordinates from [
28],
representation (
5) was generalized appropriately to introduce
p-generalized three-dimensional complex numbers in [
3]. While the latter coordinates are particularly suitable for describing points on
-spheres, the coordinate system introduced in Definition 1 is aimed at describing points on
-spheres. A dynamic complex structure of the type considered here was introduced for the first time in [
36] for the two-dimensional case.
Finally, the importance of the vector representation of complex numbers rather than the pretty unclear representation of should be emphasized against the background of the formulas developed here.
When complex numbers are introduced, one of the things that is usually said is that
and
It is clear that a maximum satisfactory mathematical rigor is only achieved when an interpretation has been replaced with an axiom and the unsatisfiable Equation (
7) has been replaced by a well-defined one, as in [
37].
If the Euler number
and the usual exponential function
are given, one can ask whether there is an abstract quantity or so called imaginary number
i that satisfies (
6)–(
8) and also the equations
which are stated to be valid in many mathematical sources. For a science like mathematics, which is based, among other things, on the completely exact and pedantically precise derivation of all its statements, it is astonishing that there does not seem to be a derivation of Equation (
9) that does not use a so-called artifice, such as equating the number 1 with the vector
or something similar, contrary to all mathematical rules. But, if we interpret the expression on the right side of Euler’s well-known formula
in terms of points in the plane, or vectors,
then Equation (
9) becomes
through a simple vector calculation. Gauss’s interpretation of complex numbers as points on the plane was transformed into the status of an axiom in [
37], thereby probably defining complex numbers completely precisely for the first time. Some initial consequences that arise from the vector representation of complex numbers for the characteristic functions of probability distributions were presented elsewhere.
Complex numbers are used in numerous areas of science and technology. Similarly, dynamic models of the type presented here can find wide application. However, due to the variety of practical tasks, the development of numerous other dynamic models generated by a functional other than
may also be desirable. This can then be realized following the central themes of the present work. This concerns both the creation of new number structures and the probabilistic treatment of them in the sense of the present work. Some functionals that may be of interest from the perspective of probability distributions are presented in
Appendix A. In addition, it can be useful to develop stochastic representations and simulation techniques in the newly created number structures.