NavList:

   

Reply

William Rowan Hamilton was Irish studied at Trinity College Dublin.... I'm
quite proud of having read Engineering there. Our Maths Prof. never allowed
us forget Hamilton !
Just did a quick google search, as I never followed up much on this before:
http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Hamilton.html

Aubrey.


At 03:20 14-02-03, you wrote:
>On Thursday, February 13, 2003, at 05:20 PM, Robert Eno wrote:
>
>>What is a quaternion?
>
>In the world of mathematics there are a variety of numbers:
>
>* scalars
>     - single numbers (3.14, 58)
>* complex numbers
>     - pairs of numbers like x,y points (1,2)
>     - also written as real + imaginary (1+2i)
>     - a set of arithmetic operations are defined such that
>       the square root of -1 is an imaginary number called i
>* vectors
>     - several numbers (often 2-4) grouped together (1,2,3)
>     - often used to represent dimensions of space and time
>     - special operations like dot and cross product defined
>     - used in navigation, i.e., a 2D vector is distance & course
>* tensors
>     - a matrix of numbers used in advanced physics & relativity
>[(1,2,3)(4,5,6)]
>     - a generalization of vectors
>* quaternions
>     - 4 numbers grouped together (q1,q2,q3,q4)
>     - used in rigid body rotations and computer graphics
>     - invented by Sir William Rowan Hamilton, circa 1866.
>     - allows multiple rotations be to computed with fewer operations
>     - think of them as a cross between a 3D vector and a complex number
>     - shares some properties of both vectors and complex numbers
>
>http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~laura/cs184/quat/quaternion.html for more.
>
>Dan

   

Reply