Hamilton

William Rowan

Hamilton

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WILLIAM ROWAN HAMILTON is considered to be Ireland’s most famous mathematician. His early education was astonishing. By age 5 he could read and translate Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. By age 10 he was fluent in French and Italian and was studying Asian languages. At 17, he had a grasp of calculus and astronomy.


Hamilton’s formal education began when he entered Trinity College in Dublin at age 18. He so impressed his teachers there that after 4 years in undergraduate school, he was elected to the position of professor of astronomy. In 1828, his first year on the faculty, he published an impressive work on optics entitled A Theory of Systems of Rays. This paper firmly established Hamilton’s reputation, and it has become one of the classics of Western science. In it Hamilton included some of his own methods for working with systems of linear equations. He also introduced the notion of the characteristic equation of a matrix.


During the last 20 years of his life, Hamilton devoted most of his mathematical creativity to developing the theory of a special type of number he called a quaternion. This work paved the way for the development of the modern notion of a vector, and we still use Hamilton’s i, j, k notation for the standard unit vectors in 3-space.

Hamilton

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