William Rowan Hamilton Quotes

Sir William Rowan Hamilton MRIA was an Irish mathematician. While still an undergraduate he was appointed Andrews professor of Astronomy and Royal Astronomer of Ireland, and lived at Dunsink Observatory. He made important contributions to optics, classical mechanics and algebra. Although Hamilton was not a physicist–he regarded himself as a pure mathematician–his work was of major importance to physics, particularly his reformulation of Newtonian mechanics, now called Hamiltonian mechanics. This work has proven central to the modern study of classical field theories such as electromagnetism, and to the development of quantum mechanics. In pure mathematics, he is best known as the inventor of quaternions.