Abstract :
When Irish mathematician William Hamilton first described the number system called quaternions in 1843, it was applied to the field of mechanics only. The quaternion, the quotient of two directed lines or vectors in 3-D space, was for Hamilton a fundamental structural component of the universe. Hamilton inspired Maxwell to write his famous electromagnetic equations in terms of quaternions; however, they proved to be unwieldy and ineffective for that purpose. This prompted others (namely, Heaviside, Gibbs, and Helmholtz) to develop a simpler system for vector analysis that would be more readily adopted by physicists and engineers.
