Staff and students in the maths department at NUI Maynooth take to the banks of the Royal Canal, Dublin, today to mark the anniversary of the creation of quaternions.
On this day, in 1843, William Rowan Hamilton, world-renowned mathematician, created the quaternions in a flash of inspiration while marking on the banks of the Royal Canal.
A quaternion is a type of four-dimensional number, and was a totally new concept in maths.
They played an important role in some major scientific breakthroughs. For example, they were fundamental in the formulation of Maxwell's theory of electromagnetic waves, postulated in 1864.
This theory ultimately led to the invention of the first wireless by Marconi in 1895, and then radio, television and radar all followed, according to NUI Maynooth's department of mathematics.
Vector analysis, an indispensable part of modern physics, is an offspring of quatermions. Quaternions are also used for designing computer games. Apparently, it's to quaternions we owe the "existence" of Tomb Raider's Lara Croft.
Each year, the maths department at NUI Maynooth, among others, commemorates this event by retracing Hamilton's steps.
The walk begins at Dunsink Observatory and heads south to meet the Royal Canal before going along the canal to end up at Broombridge train station, where a plaque, on the bridge, marks the area where Hamilton scratched his formula for quaternions. To this day, Hamiltonian mechanics is used commercially to determine orbital trajectories of satellites.
