Timeline for William Rowan Hamilton and Algebra as Time
Current License: CC BY-SA 2.5
14 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jun 15, 2020 at 7:27 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
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| Nov 30, 2018 at 6:47 | answer | added | Mike | timeline score: 1 | |
| Nov 30, 2018 at 6:35 | comment | added | Mike | It might also be helpful to point out the reference where Hamilton actually said that last quote: "Life of Sir William Rowan Hamilton", vol. 3, p. 635. | |
| Feb 24, 2018 at 17:38 | comment | added | Peter Heinig | (Upvoting the following would be useful: the maa-link at 2010-12-07 01:39:33Z seems defunct. I am quite sure that the content in question is at maa.org/external_archive/devlin/devlin_03_10.html.) | |
| Feb 27, 2011 at 6:22 | comment | added | KConrad | It would be good to say why you cite d'Alembert in 1754. On p. 1010 of volume 4 of Diderot's Encyclopedie (1754), d'Alembert writes "A clever gentelman with whom I am acquainted believes that nevertheless, one could view duration as a fourth dimension and that the product time by solidity would be somehow a product of four dimensions." I learned this from pp. 5--6 of Lang's Calculus of Several Variables. Lang remarked that the clever gentelman is probably d'Alembert himself, who was hesitant to attach himself too closely to (quoting Lang) "what must have been at the time a far out idea". | |
| Dec 7, 2010 at 15:47 | comment | added | Franz Lemmermeyer | I don't think it is correct to think of Hamilton's idea as "ahead of his time" just because it formally resembles Minkowski's idea of a spacetime. Hamilton, and several generations of Irish mathematicians after him, tried hard to find possible applications of quaternions. Why did he do this? Guinness and Whiskey, I would guess. | |
| Dec 7, 2010 at 13:25 | comment | added | Cam McLeman | Not at all. I'm interested in any way of getting from quaternions to time that passes through Hamilton-era physics. Or perhaps the alternative is that this line of thought can be considered one of the first precursors to relativity and related ideas -- I don't know. | |
| Dec 7, 2010 at 1:45 | comment | added | j.c. | Is there a modern viewpoint of quaternions in physics that you have in mind? There are many uses in physics if one allows that SU(2) is the unit quaternions, but I don't see these as directly admitting interpretations involving time. | |
| Dec 7, 2010 at 1:39 | comment | added | j.c. | To save others the trouble of googling, Keith Devlin writes on Melanie Bayley's take on Alice here maa.org/devlin/devlin_03_10.html and there's a copy of Bayley's original article here mssia.wordpress.com/2010/03/09/alices-algebra | |
| Dec 6, 2010 at 23:42 | history | edited | Cam McLeman | CC BY-SA 2.5 |
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| Dec 6, 2010 at 18:52 | comment | added | Cam McLeman | Indeed! I'm directing a student project understanding the link, and couldn't explain this part of it. | |
| Dec 6, 2010 at 18:01 | comment | added | stankewicz | Are you curious about this because of the recent reinterpretation of the "Mad Tea Party" of Alice in Wonderland as a critique of Hamilton's quaternions? | |
| Dec 6, 2010 at 16:44 | answer | added | Kristal Cantwell | timeline score: 11 | |
| Dec 6, 2010 at 15:10 | history | asked | Cam McLeman | CC BY-SA 2.5 |