Sir William Rowan Hamilton
A.D. 1805 - 1865
Maxwell's mathematical basis for his triumphant unification of these two
great mystery forces of 19th Century physics were "quaternions" -- a term
invented (adopted would be a more precise description) in the 1840s by
mathematician Sir William Rowan Hamilton, for "an ordered pair of
complex numbers" (quaternion = four). Complex numbers themselves, according to
Hamilton's clarifications of long-mysterious terms such as "imaginary" and
"real" numbers utilized in earlier definitions, were nothing more than "pairs
of real numbers which are added or multiplied according to certain formal
rules." In 1887, A.S. Hathaway formally extended Hamilton's ideas regarding
quaternions as "sets of four real numbers" to the idea of four spatial
dimensions, in a paper entitled "Quaternions as numbers of
four-dimensional space," published in the Bulletin of the American
Mathematical Society [4 (1887), 54-7].
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