Here as he walked by on the 16th of October 1843 Sir William Rowan Hamilton in a flash of genius discovered the fundamental formula for quaternion multiplication
i = j = k = ijk = −1
& cut it on a stone of this bridge.
In mathematics, quaternions are a non-commutative number system that extends the complex numbers. Quaternions and their applications to rotations were first described in print by Olinde Rodrigues in all but name in 1840,[1] but independently discovered by Irish mathematician Sir William Rowan Hamilton in 1843 and applied to mechanics in three-dimensional space. They find uses in both theoretical and applied mathematics, in particular for calculations involving three-dimensional rotations.
In 1843, Hamilton knew that the complex numbers could be viewed as points in a plane and that they could be added and multiplied together using certain geometric operations. Hamilton sought to find a way to do the same for points in space. Points in space can be represented by their coordinates, which are triples of numbers and have an obvious addition, but Hamilton had difficulty defining the appropriate multiplication.
According to a letter Hamilton wrote later to his son Archibald:
Every morning in the early part of October 1843, on my coming down to breakfast, your brother William Edwin and yourself used to ask me: "Well, Papa, can you multiply triples?" Whereto I was always obliged to reply, with a sad shake of the head, "No, I can only add and subtract them."
On October 16, 1843, Hamilton and his wife took a walk along the Royal Canal in Dublin. While they walked across Brougham Bridge (now Broom Bridge), a solution suddenly occurred to him. While he could not "multiply triples", he saw a way to do so for quadruples. By using three of the numbers in the quadruple as the points of a coordinate in space, Hamilton could represent points in space by his new system of numbers. He then carved the basic rules for multiplication into the bridge:
i2 = j2 = k2 = ijk = −1
Hamilton called a quadruple with these rules of multiplication a quaternion, and he devoted the remainder of his life to studying and teaching them. From 1844 to 1850 Philosophical Magazine communicated Hamilton's exposition of quaternions.[2] In 1853 he issued Lectures on Quaternions, a comprehensive treatise that also described biquaternions. The facility of the algebra in expressing geometric relationships led to broad acceptance of the method, several compositions by other authors, and stimulation of applied algebra generally. As mathematical terminology has grown since that time, and usage of some terms has changed, the traditional expressions are referred to as classical Hamiltonian quaternions.
Precursors
Hamilton's innovation consisted of expressing quaternions as an algebra over R. The formulae for the multiplication of quaternions are implicit in the four squares formula devised by Leonhard Euler in 1748; Olinde Rodrigues applied this formula to representing rotations in 1840.[3]:9
Response
The special claims of quaternions as the algebra of four-dimensional space were challenged by James Cockle with his exhibits in 1848 and 1849 of tessarines and coquaternions as alternatives. Nevertheless, these new algebras from Cockle were, in fact, to be found inside Hamilton's biquaternions. From Italy, in 1858 Giusto Bellavitis responded[4] to connect Hamilton's vector theory with his theory of equipollences of directed line segments.
Jules Hoüel led the response from France in 1874 with a textbook on the elements of quaternions. To ease the study of versors, he introduced "biradials" to designate great circle arcs on the sphere. Then the quaternion algebra provided the foundation for spherical trigonometry introduced in chapter 9. Hoüel replaced Hamilton's basis vectors i, j, k with i1, i2, and i3.
The variety of fonts available led Hoüel to another notational innovation: A designates a point, a and a are algebraic quantities, and in the equation for a quaternion
William K. Clifford expanded the types of biquaternions, and explored elliptic space, a geometry in which the points can be viewed as versors. Fascination with quaternions began before the language of set theory and mathematical structures was available. In fact, there was little mathematical notation before the Formulario mathematico. The quaternions stimulated these advances: For example, the idea of a vector space borrowed Hamilton's term but changed its meaning. Under the modern understanding, any quaternion is a vector in four-dimensional space. (Hamilton's vectors lie in the subspace with scalar part zero.)
Since quaternions demand their readers to imagine four dimensions, there is a metaphysical aspect to their invocation. Quaternions are a philosophical object. Setting quaternions before freshmen students of engineering asks too much. Yet the utility of dot products and cross products in three-dimensional space, for illustration of processes, calls for the uses of these operations which are cut out of the quaternion product. Thus Willard Gibbs and Oliver Heaviside made this accommodation, for pragmatism, to avoid the distracting superstructure.[7]
For mathematicians the quaternion structure became familiar and lost its status as something mathematically interesting. Thus in England, when Arthur Buchheim prepared a paper on biquaternions, it was published in the American Journal of Mathematics since some novelty in the subject lingered there. Research turned to hypercomplex numbers more generally. For instance, Thomas Kirkman and Arthur Cayley considered the number of equations between basis vectors which would be necessary to determine a unique system. The wide interest that quaternions aroused around the world resulted in the Quaternion Society. In contemporary mathematics, the division ring of quaternions exemplifies an algebra over a field.
1940 Julian Coolidge in A History of Geometrical Methods, page 261, uses the coordinate-free methods of Hamilton's operators and cites A. L. Lawrence's work at Harvard. Coolidge uses these operators on dual quaternions to describe screw displacement in kinematics.
Octonions were developed independently by Arthur Cayley in 1845 [20] and John T. Graves, a friend of Hamilton's. Graves had interested Hamilton in algebra, and responded to his discovery of quaternions with "If with your alchemy you can make three pounds of gold [the three imaginary units], why should you stop there?"[21]
Two months after Hamilton's discovery of quaternions, Graves wrote Hamilton on December 26, 1843, presenting a kind of double quaternion,[22] which he called octaves, and showed that they were what we now call a normeddivision algebra.[23] Hamilton observed in reply that they were not associative, which may have been the invention of the concept. He also promised to get Graves' work published, but did little about it. Hamilton needed a way to distinguish between two different types of double quaternions, the associative biquaternions and the octaves. He spoke about them to the Royal Irish Society and credited his friend Graves for the discovery of the second type of double quaternion.[24][25]
Cayley, working independently of Graves, but inspired by Hamilton's publication of his own work, published on octonions in March 1845– as an appendix to a paper on a different subject. Hamilton was stung into protesting Graves' priority in discovery, if not publication; nevertheless, octonions are known by the name Cayley gave them– or as Cayley numbers.
The major deduction from the existence of octonions was the eight squares theorem, which follows directly from the product rule from octonions. It had also been previously discovered as a purely algebraic identity by Carl Ferdinand Degen in 1818.[26] This sum-of-squares identity is characteristic of composition algebra, a feature of complex numbers, quaternions, and octonions.
Quaternions continued to be a well-studied mathematical structure in the twentieth century, as the third term in the Cayley–Dickson construction of hypercomplex number systems over the reals, followed by the octonions, the sedenions, the trigintaduonions; they are also a useful tool in number theory, particularly in the study of the representation of numbers as sums of squares. The group of eight basic unit quaternions, positive and negative, the quaternion group, is also the simplest non-commutative Sylow group.
The study of integral quaternions began with Rudolf Lipschitz in 1886, whose system was later simplified by Leonard Eugene Dickson; but the modern system was published by Adolf Hurwitz in 1919. The difference between them consists of which quaternions are accounted integral: Lipschitz included only those quaternions with integral coordinates, but Hurwitz added those quaternions all four of whose coordinates are half-integers. Both systems are closed under subtraction and multiplication, and are therefore rings, but Lipschitz's system does not permit unique factorization, while Hurwitz's does.[27]
Quaternions are a concise method of representing the automorphisms of three- and four-dimensional spaces. They have the technical advantage that unit quaternions form the simply connected cover of the space of three-dimensional rotations.[3]:ch 2
In mathematics, the octonions are a normed division algebra over the real numbers, a kind of hypercomplex number system. The octonions are usually represented by the capital letter O, using boldface O or blackboard bold . Octonions have eight dimensions; twice the number of dimensions of the quaternions, of which they are an extension. They are noncommutative and nonassociative, but satisfy a weaker form of associativity; namely, they are alternative. They are also power associative.
In mathematics, hypercomplex number is a traditional term for an element of a finite-dimensional unital algebra over the field of real numbers. The study of hypercomplex numbers in the late 19th century forms the basis of modern group representation theory.
In mathematics, the quaternion number system extends the complex numbers. Quaternions were first described by the Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton in 1843 and applied to mechanics in three-dimensional space. The algebra of quaternions is often denoted by H, or in blackboard bold by Quaternions are not a field, because multiplication of quaternions is not, in general, commutative. Quaternions provide a definition of the quotient of two vectors in a three-dimensional space. Quaternions are generally represented in the form
In mathematics, the Cayley–Dickson construction, sometimes also known as the Cayley–Dickson process or the Cayley–Dickson procedure produces a sequence of algebras over the field of real numbers, each with twice the dimension of the previous one. It is named after Arthur Cayley and Leonard Eugene Dickson. The algebras produced by this process are known as Cayley–Dickson algebras, for example complex numbers, quaternions, and octonions. These examples are useful composition algebras frequently applied in mathematical physics.
In mathematics, an algebra over a field is a vector space equipped with a bilinear product. Thus, an algebra is an algebraic structure consisting of a set together with operations of multiplication and addition and scalar multiplication by elements of a field and satisfying the axioms implied by "vector space" and "bilinear".
In mathematics, a square is the result of multiplying a number by itself. The verb "to square" is used to denote this operation. Squaring is the same as raising to the power 2, and is denoted by a superscript 2; for instance, the square of 3 may be written as 32, which is the number 9. In some cases when superscripts are not available, as for instance in programming languages or plain text files, the notations x^2 (caret) or x**2 may be used in place of x2. The adjective which corresponds to squaring is quadratic.
In abstract algebra, the algebra of hyperbolic quaternions is a nonassociative algebra over the real numbers with elements of the form
In abstract algebra, the biquaternions are the numbers w + xi + yj + zk, where w, x, y, and z are complex numbers, or variants thereof, and the elements of {1, i, j, k} multiply as in the quaternion group and commute with their coefficients. There are three types of biquaternions corresponding to complex numbers and the variations thereof:
In abstract algebra, the split-quaternions or coquaternions form an algebraic structure introduced by James Cockle in 1849 under the latter name. They form an associative algebra of dimension four over the real numbers.
In mathematics, a versor is a quaternion of norm one. Each versor has the form
In mathematics, a quaternion algebra over a field F is a central simple algebra A over F that has dimension 4 over F. Every quaternion algebra becomes a matrix algebra by extending scalars, i.e. for a suitable field extension K of F, is isomorphic to the 2 × 2 matrix algebra over K.
In mathematics, a composition algebraA over a field K is a not necessarily associative algebra over K together with a nondegenerate quadratic form N that satisfies
In mathematics, a split-biquaternion is a hypercomplex number of the form
In abstract algebra, a bicomplex number is a pair (w, z) of complex numbers constructed by the Cayley–Dickson process that defines the bicomplex conjugate , and the product of two bicomplex numbers as
A non-associative algebra (or distributive algebra) is an algebra over a field where the binary multiplication operation is not assumed to be associative. That is, an algebraic structure A is a non-associative algebra over a field K if it is a vector space over K and is equipped with a K-bilinear binary multiplication operation A × A → A which may or may not be associative. Examples include Lie algebras, Jordan algebras, the octonions, and three-dimensional Euclidean space equipped with the cross product operation. Since it is not assumed that the multiplication is associative, using parentheses to indicate the order of multiplications is necessary. For example, the expressions (ab)(cd), (a(bc))d and a(b(cd)) may all yield different answers.
The Quaternion Society was a scientific society, self-described as an "International Association for Promoting the Study of Quaternions and Allied Systems of Mathematics". At its peak it consisted of about 60 mathematicians spread throughout the academic world that were experimenting with quaternions and other hypercomplex number systems. The group's guiding light was Alexander Macfarlane who served as its secretary initially, and became president in 1909. The association published a Bibliography in 1904 and a Bulletin from 1900 to 1913.
In mathematics, Hurwitz's theorem is a theorem of Adolf Hurwitz (1859–1919), published posthumously in 1923, solving the Hurwitz problem for finite-dimensional unital real non-associative algebras endowed with a nondegenerate positive-definite quadratic form. The theorem states that if the quadratic form defines a homomorphism into the positive real numbers on the non-zero part of the algebra, then the algebra must be isomorphic to the real numbers, the complex numbers, the quaternions, or the octonions, and that there are no other possibilities. Such algebras, sometimes called Hurwitz algebras, are examples of composition algebras.
In the field of mathematics called abstract algebra, a division algebra is, roughly speaking, an algebra over a field in which division, except by zero, is always possible.
In mathematics, a bioctonion, or complex octonion, is a pair (p,q) where p and q are biquaternions.
The Geometry of the Octonions is a mathematics book on the octonions, a system of numbers generalizing the complex numbers and quaternions, presenting its material at a level suitable for undergraduate mathematics students. It was written by Tevian Dray and Corinne Manogue, and published in 2015 by World Scientific. The Basic Library List Committee of the Mathematical Association of America has suggested its inclusion in undergraduate mathematics libraries.
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