In recent years, the field of complex, hypercomplex-valued and geometric Support Vector Machines (SVM) has undergone immense progress due to the compatibility of complex and hypercomplex number representations with analytic signals, as well as the power of description that geometric entities provide to object descriptors. Thus, several interesting applications can be developed using these types of data and algorithms, such as signal processing, pattern recognition, classification of electromagnetic signals, light, sonic/ultrasonic and quantum waves, chaos in the complex domain, phase and phase-sensitive signal processing and nonlinear filtering, frequency, time-frequency and spatiotemporal domain processing, quantum computation, robotics, control, time series prediction, and visual servoing, among others. This paper presents and discusses the importance, recent progress, prospective applications, and future directions of complex, hypercomplex-valued and geometric Support Vector Machines.