Sir William Rowan Hamilton MRIA (3 August 1805 – 2 September 1865) was an Irish mathematician, Andrews Professor of Astronomy at Trinity College Dublin, and Royal Astronomer of Ireland. He worked in both pure mathematics and mathematics for physics. He made important contributions to optics, classical mechanics and algebra. Although Hamilton was not a physicist–he regarded himself as a pure mathematician–his work was of major importance to physics, particularly his reformulation of Newtonian mechanics, now called Hamiltonian mechanics. This work has proven central to the modern study of classical field theories such as electromagnetism, and to the development of quantum mechanics. In pure mathematics, he is best known as the inventor of quaternions.[1]
Helen Bayly married William Rowan Hamilton (1805–1865) on 9 April 1833 at Ballinaclough, Ireland. The marriage was announced in the Belfast Newsletter of 16 April 1833:
They had three children:
His marriage is described dismally in Math and mathematicians : the history of math discoveries around the world:
Anne van Weerden, a Dutch researcher, disagrees that he was an "an unhappily married alcoholic". She noted "His own description of the discovery of the quaternions, which he made when he was walking with his wife, breathes such a peaceful atmosphere that it became the inducement to investigate how an alleged unhappy marriage could lead to such a circumstance." Her 2017 essay, A Victorian Marriage : Sir William Rowan Hamilton, shows "that he did have a good marriage, and that according to current standards he was by no means an alcoholic."[5]
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