William rowan hamilton biography

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It was referred as usual to a committee. Philos. Often a single letter of Hamilton's occupied from 50 to 100 or more closely written pages, all devoted to the minute consideration of every feature of some particular problem; for it was one of the peculiar characteristics of Hamilton's mind never to be satisfied with a general understanding of a question; Hamilton pursued the problem until he knew it in all its details.

After recommending the sentiments expressed in the 145th psalm of the bible, he died that very afternoon. Hamilton then promptly carved this equation into the side of the nearby Broom Bridge (which Hamilton called Brougham Bridge).

william rowan hamilton biography

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Hamilton's introduction to mathematics came at the age of 13 when he studied Clairaut's Algebra, a task made somewhat easier as Hamilton was fluent in French by this time.

In this period he turned to poetry, which was a habit that he pursued for the rest of his life in times of anguish. Philos. It is in this paper that Hamilton introduced the characteristic function for optics.

On 4 November 1833 Hamilton read a paper to the Royal Irish Academy expressing complex numbers as algebraic couples, or ordered pairs of real numbers.

Last years

Toward the end of his life, Hamilton was completing "Elements of Quaternions"—what he hoped would be an improvement over his "Lectures on Quaternions" published earlier. B23(1990), 45-62.

  • P Ohrstrom, W R Hamilton's view of algebra as the science of pure time and his revision of this view, Historia Math.12(1)(1985), 45-55.
  • H T H Piaggio, The significance and development of Hamilton's quaternions, Nature152(1943), 553-555.
  • L S Polak, William Rowan Hamilton (on the 150th anniversary of his birth)(Russian), Trudy Inst.

    And it must be said that Hamilton’s time was better employed in original investigations than it would have been had he spent it in observations made even with the best of instruments. He tried to quit for a time in the mid-1840s, but was shamed for doing so by a fellow scientist and fell back into the habit. He used algebra in treating dynamics in On a General Method in Dynamics in 1834.

    Conical refraction results in a conical formation of light rays from a single ray passing through certain crystal formations classified as biaxial. At this point, William became depressed and started to have problems with alcohol so his sister came back to live at Dunsink. It is said that his wife was not the best housekeeper, and the chaotic state of his study was legendary.

    He was in the habit of putting in a 12-hour work day, often laboring through the night and into the morning. http://www.gutenberg.net/etext06/tbmms10p.pdf

  • J Mathews, William Rowan Hamilton's paper of 1837 on the arithmetization of analysis, Arch. Between the ages of nine and ten, he picked up Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian, while mastering Italian and French.