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 ...
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 ...
Artist Aisling O’Beirn’s new exhibition charts her quest to understand Hamilton’s quaternions through objects, space and … knitting. In October 1843, Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton was ...