Sir William Rowan Hamilton Research Paper

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Tamara Hernandez Mr. Best Math 1332 April 2, 2014 Sir William Rowan Hamilton was born on August 4, 1805 in Dublin, Ireland. His remarkable intelligence developed at the early age of 3, and he made many successful contributions in math and science. Hamilton excelled in the dynamics of the math and science world such as geometrical optics, quaternions, Cayley-Hamilton theorem, and Hamiltonian mechanics. On April 23, 1827 while studying geometrical optics Hamilton discovered The Theory System of Rays. The Theory System of Rays helped determine how light travels through an energy of waves. “Theory of Systems of Rays proves that a system of light rays filling a region of space can be focused down to a single point by a suitably curved mirror if and only if those light rays are orthogonal to some series of surfaces,”(Theory of Systems of Rays) written by the Editors of the Encyclopedia Britannica. In 1857, Hamilton developed a new mathematical concept which is known as quaternions. Quaternions is a complex algebraic number system that includes multiplication of real and imag...

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