William Rowan Hamilton
1805-1865

Language prodigy, had started to read Latin, Greek, Hebrew at age 4, went on to master several oriental languages by age 10 (the Gell-Mann of the early 19th century!). Educated at Trinity College, Dublin. Thesis on optics presented to the Royal Irish Academy about 1826. This contained the first development of Hamilton's characteristic function. Appointed Professor of Astronomy at Trinity in 1826, later Astronomer Royal of Ireland.

Great work on Hamilton's principle, Hamilton's equations of motion, and Hamilton-Jacobi theory published in 1834 and 1835. Discovered the quaternion algebra H in 1843. ( H is one of the four finite dimensional division algebras R, C, H, O over the reals - multiplication is noncommutative in H, and noncommutative and nonassociative for the "Cayley numbers" or octonions O.) Quaternions were later used for vector algebra by Gibbs and others, appear now as the algebra of the Pauli matrices in the theory of rotations.