and Lehigh University, and Charles Jasper Joly (1864-1906), Hamilton’s successor at the

Dunsink Observatory. But in time, the more supple vector analysis of the American physicist and
mathematician, Josiah Willard Gibbs (1839— 1903) of Yale University, and the more general
treatment of ordered ^-tuples of Hermann Gunther Grassmann, tended to relegate the theory of
quaternions to little more than a highly interesting museum piece. It is true quaternions were
somewhat revived in 1927 as the “spin variables” in Wolfgang Pauli’s (1900- 1958) quantum
theory, and it could be that the future may give quaternions a new lease on life. No matter what,
the great importance of quaternions in the history of mathematics lies in the fact that their
creation by Hamilton in 1843 liberated algebra from its traditional ties to the arithmetic of real
numbers, and accordingly opened the floodgates of modern abstract algebra.
In addition to his work on quaternions, Hamilton wrote on optics, dynamics, the solution of
equations of the fifth degree, fluctuating functions, the hodograph curve of a moving particle,15
and the numerical solution of differential equations.
Hamilton’s name is encountered by students of physics in the so-called Hamiltonian function and
in the Hamilton-Jacobi differential equations of dynamics. In matrix theory, there is the
Hamilton-Cayley theorem, equation, and polynomial; in mathematical recreations, one
encounters the Hamiltonian game played on a regular dodecahedron (see Problem Study 13.24).
It is perhaps pleasing to Americans to recall that in the sad final years of Hamilton’s illness and
marital strife, the newly founded National Academy of Sciences of the United States elected him
as its first foreign associate. Another rare honor and compliment accorded Hamilton occurred
when, in 1845, he attended the second Cambridge meeting of the British Association; he was
lodged for a week in the sacred rooms of Trinity College in which tradition asserts that Isaac
Newton composed his Principia.
Sir William Rowan Hamilton is not to be confused with his contemporary, Sir William Hamilton
(1788-1856), the noted philosopher of Edinburgh. The latter inherited his title; the former earned
his.
Grassmann was born in Stettin, Germany, in 1809, and died there in 1877. He was a man of very
broad intellectual interests. He was not only a teacher of mathematics, but of religion, physics,
chemistry, German, Latin, history, and geography. He wrote on physics and composed school
texts for the study of German, Latin, and mathematics. He was a copublisher of a political
weekly in the stormy years of 1848 and 1849. He was interested in music, and in the 1860s, he
was an opera critic for a daily newspaper. He prepared a philological treatise on German plants,
edited a missionary paper, investigated phonetic laws, wrote a dictionary to the Rig-Veda and
translated the Rig-Veda in verse, harmonized folk songs in three voices, composed his great
treatise Aus- dehnungslehre, and raised nine of his eleven children.