The story of William Rowan Hamilton’s discovery of new four-dimensional numbers called quaternions is familiar. The solution of a problem that had bothered him for years occurred to him in a flash of ...

Imagine winding the hour hand of a clock back from 3 o’clock to noon. Mathematicians have long known how to describe this rotation as a simple multiplication: A number representing the initial ...

Irish physicist, astronomer, and mathematician Sir William Rowan Hamilton introduced quaternions, a non-commutative extension of complex numbers, on October 16, 1843. Benjamin Olinde Rodrigues had ...

JUST as “one shove of the bayonet” was truly said to be more effective than any number of learned discussions on the art of war:— this really practical work, giving genuine quaternion solutions of new ...

HAVING a vivid recollection of the pleasure I derived born Prof. Gibbs's attacks upon the quaternionic system in the rather one-sided discussion that took place about two years ago in this journal, I ...