If you’ve ever dealt with orbital mechanics or sophisticated computer graphics, you’ve probably run across the math term quaternions. [Anyleaf] has a guide to the practical use of this math concept ...

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 ...

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 ...

Over the past 11 years, our national Maths Week has promoted awareness and appreciation of mathematics in the world around us, with hundreds of events held around the country to demonstrate the ...

THE year 1844 is memorable in the annals of mathematics on account of the first appearance on the printed page of Hamilton's “Quaternions” and Grassmann's “Ausdehnungslehre.” The former appeared in ...

IN this book the author establishes the principles of quaternions by the use of the six operations—addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, reversion, and mean reversion. By the introduction ...

If all you had at your mathematical disposal was the idea of real numbers, you could still get very far. From Galileo to Newton to Coulomb to Maxwell, the entirety of classical physics is built on the ...

It’s 179 years since William Rowan Hamilton really put Ireland on the maths map by inventing quaternions. This is a four-dimensional number system with a highly usual property as the order in which ...

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 ...

Have you ever sat in a math classroom and wondered, “When will I ever use this?” You might have asked yourself this question when you first encountered “imaginary” numbers, and with good reason: What ...