Timeline for William Rowan Hamilton and Algebra as Time
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
6 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Dec 8, 2015 at 6:49 | history | edited | Kristal Cantwell | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
fixed missing link
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| Dec 7, 2010 at 14:09 | comment | added | Cam McLeman | I'd found the latter, but not the former. Thanks for the reference. | |
| Dec 7, 2010 at 10:41 | comment | added | David Corfield | 0 Try these: Bloor, D. (1981), 'Hamilton and Peacock on the Essence of Algebra', in H. Mehrtens, H. Bos and I. Schneider (eds.), Social History of Nineteenth Century Mathematics, Boston: Birkhäuser, 202-32. Hendry, J. (1984), 'The evolution of William Rowan Hamilton's view of algebra as the science of pure time', Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 15 (1), 63-81. | |
| Dec 6, 2010 at 20:26 | comment | added | Kristal Cantwell | Quaternions can be used to describe rotations in three dimensional space in which the real term is the cosine of half the angle and the other three coordinates represent the axis of rotation so that could be motivation for thinking of three of the coordinates spatial and the fourth as non-spatial. | |
| Dec 6, 2010 at 17:24 | comment | added | Cam McLeman | Thanks. I had found this connection as well, but didn't (maybe couldn't) track down anything more precise. For example, it seems like interpreting Hamiltonian's scalar as a 4th spatial dimension would equally satisfy these intuitions. | |
| Dec 6, 2010 at 16:44 | history | answered | Kristal Cantwell | CC BY-SA 2.5 |