Imagine winding the hour hand of a clock back from 3 o’clock to noon. Mathematicians have long known how to describe this rotation as a simple multiplication: A number representing the initial ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. The Universe is out there, waiting for you to discover it. If all you had at your mathematical disposal was the idea of real ...

Imagine winding the hour hand of a clock back from 3 o’clock to noon. Mathematicians have long known how to describe this rotation as a simple multiplication: A number representing the initial ...

Have you ever sat in a math classroom and wondered, “When will I ever use this?” You might have asked yourself this question when you first encountered “imaginary” numbers, and with good reason: What ...

Irish physicist, astronomer, and mathematician Sir William Rowan Hamilton introduced quaternions, a non-commutative extension of complex numbers, on October 16, 1843. Benjamin Olinde Rodrigues had ...

It’s 179 years since William Rowan Hamilton really put Ireland on the maths map by inventing quaternions. This is a four-dimensional number system with a highly usual property as the order in which ...

IN this book the author establishes the principles of quaternions by the use of the six operations—addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, reversion, and mean reversion. By the introduction ...