Quaternions and vectors Hamilton called his 4D numbers "quaternions," and he used them to calculate geometrical rotations in 3D space.

I am asked whether the “spoonfeeding,” as he terms it, of Maxwell, Fitzgerald, &c., is not good enough for me. Why, of course not. It is quaternionic, and that is the real point concerned.

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 ...

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On the other hand, Lord Kelvin declared that quaternions, “though beautifully ingenious, have been an unmixed evil to those who have touched them in any way, including Clerk Maxwell”.

The story of William Rowan Hamilton’s discovery of new four-dimensional numbers called quaternions is familiar. The solution of a problem that had bothered him for years occurred to him in a ...