British (United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland)
Alma mater
Trinity College Dublin
Known for
Hamilton's principle Hamiltonian mechanics Hamiltonians Hamilton–Jacobi equation Quaternions Biquaternions Hamiltonian path Icosian calculus Nabla symbol Versor Coining the word 'tensor' Coining the word 'scalar' cis notation Hamiltonian vector field Icosian game Universal algebra Hodograph Hamiltonian group Cayley–Hamilton theorem
Spouse
Helen Maria Bayly
Children
William Edwin Hamilton, Archibald Henry Hamilton, Helen Eliza Amelia O'Regan, née Hamilton
Awards
Royal Medal (1835) Cunningham Medal (1834 and 1848)
Scientific career
Fields
Mathematics, astronomy, physics
Institutions
Trinity College, Dublin
Academic advisors
John Brinkley
Sir William Rowan Hamilton MRIA, FRAS (3/4 August 1805 – 2 September 1865)[1][2] was an Irish mathematician, astronomer, and physicist. He was the Andrews Professor of Astronomy at Trinity College Dublin, and Royal Astronomer of Ireland, living at Dunsink Observatory.
Hamilton was Dunsink's third director, having worked there from 1827 to 1865. His career included the study of geometrical optics, Fourier analysis, and quaternions, the last of which made him one of the founders of modern linear algebra.[3] He has made major contributions in optics, classical mechanics, and abstract algebra. His work is fundamental to modern theoretical physics, particularly his reformulation of Newtonian mechanics. Hamiltonian mechanics including its Hamilitonian function are now central both to electromagnetism and quantum mechanics.
^Hamilton was born at midnight. In his younger years, his birthday was celebrated on 3 August, but after the birth of his second son on 4 August 1835 he changed it to 4 August.
^Graves (1882) Vol. I, p. 1
^Cite error: The named reference ODNB was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
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Sir WilliamRowanHamilton MRIA, FRAS (3/4 August 1805 – 2 September 1865) was an Irish mathematician, astronomer, and physicist. He was the Andrews Professor...
is a mathematical game invented in 1856 by Irish mathematician WilliamRowanHamilton. It involves finding a Hamiltonian cycle on a dodecahedron, a cycle...
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Robert Mallet, Bartholomew Lloyd, George Johnstone Stoney and WilliamRowanHamilton. Notable faculty members and lecturers at the university included...
splits into a hollow cone. This effect was predicted in 1832 by WilliamRowanHamilton and subsequently observed by Humphrey Lloyd in the next year. It...
plaque reads: Here as he walked by on the 16th of October 1843 Sir WilliamRowanHamilton in a flash of genius discovered the fundamental formula for quaternion...
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was introduced in 1837 by the Irish mathematician and physicist WilliamRowanHamilton, who called it ◁. (The unit vectors { i , j , k } {\displaystyle...
from the verb (i.e. versor = "the turner"). It was introduced by WilliamRowanHamilton in the 1840s in the context of his quaternion theory. The term "versor"...
October each year. This is the anniversary of the day in 1843 when WilliamRowanHamilton discovered the non-commutative algebraic system known as quaternions...
non-commutative algebraic structure discovered by the Irish mathematician WilliamRowanHamilton in 1856. In modern terms, he gave a group presentation of the icosahedral...
both in an edition of Edgeworth's letters, and in the biography of WilliamRowanHamilton, the Irish astronomer and mathematician, by Robert Perceval Graves...
numbers. This article is about the ordinary biquaternions named by WilliamRowanHamilton in 1844. Some of the more prominent proponents of these biquaternions...
physicist and mathematician Sir WilliamRowanHamilton, a Hamiltonian vector field is a geometric manifestation of Hamilton's equations in classical mechanics...
James Bradley, but its practical development is mainly from Sir WilliamRowanHamilton, who published an account of it in the Proceedings of the Royal...
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