Mara Gonzales

Mr. Rodriguez

13 May 2011

William Rowan Hamilton

William Rowan Hamilton was an Irish Mathematician. Hamilton was born on

August fourth, 1805 and died in 1865. He was a child prodigy in not only math, but also

various languages. In 1823, he entered into Trinity College in Dublin. At the age of 22,

Hamilton was appointed the Professor of Astronomy and the Astronomer Royal for

Ireland. In 1827, he created his first original work, the theory of optics. In 1832, he did

further and more in depth work on rays, and predicted conical refraction under certain

conditions in biaxial crystals. In dynamics he introduced “Hamilton’s equations”. A set of

equations describing the positions and momenta of a collection of particles. Hamilton’s

principle is that the integral with respect to the time of the kinetic energy minus the

potential energy of a system is a minimum.

One of William Hamilton’s most famous discoveries was that of quaternions. This

discovery of such an algebraic system was important for the development of abstract

algebra. Hamilton spent most of his last 20 years of his life trying to apply quaternions to

problems in applied mathematics.