William Rowan Hamilton (1805–1865) was an Irish mathematician, astronomer, and physicist, best known for his contributions to classical mechanics, optics, and algebra. He is particularly famous for the development of Hamiltonian mechanics, a reformulation of Newtonian mechanics that uses the principles of energy rather than forces, which laid the groundwork for modern theoretical physics.
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William Rowan Hamilton introduced quaternions as a number system extending complex arithmetic. Their noncommutative multiplication encodes geometric structure useful for spatial rotations, while also showing that familiar real-number algebraic rules need not all survive an extension.[ref]
On Quaternions, or on a new System of Imaginaries in Algebra by William Rowan Hamilton. author attribution and the described mathematical development
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Portrait of William Rowan Hamilton
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