>From Synergetics: "The specialists brief on brevity is dubious".
Is gimbal lock a hint that the definition of physical space as three dimensional instead of four dimensional is just a case of too much brevity by mathematicians?
The reason I ask is that you can define physical space as four dimensional like the Synergetics coordinate system, which is from the tetrahedron, described at: http://bfi.org/node/574 and a method to overcome gimbal lock uses four dimensional unit quaternions.
And the Pythagoreons might have had the right idea at: