Cambridge Library Collection - Mathematics
1 primary work • 3 total works
Volume 1
The Mathematical Papers of Sir William Rowan Hamilton
by William Rowan Hamilton
Published 15 May 2011
The Mathematical Papers of Sir William Rowan Hamilton 2 Volume Set
by William Rowan Hamilton, A. W. Conway, and A. J. McConnell
Published 26 January 2010
Sir William Rowan Hamilton (1805-65) was a distinguished Irish mathematician who worked in the fields of classical mechanics, optics and algebra, as well as in physics and astronomy. Hamilton was the discoverer of quaternions, which are defined as a non-commutative number system which extends the complex numbers. He first described them in 1843, and devoted much of his subsequent life to studying and lecturing on the concept. This book was published posthumously in 1866, with the final editing by his son. Until they were replaced, from the mid-1880s, by vector analysis, quaternions were taught as a major topic in advanced mathematics at most universities, and their utility in describing spatial relations has led to a revival of interest in them since the late twentieth century.