Advances in Analysis and Geometry

On the 16th of October 1843, Sir William R. Hamilton made the discovery of the quaternion algebra H = qo + qli + q2j + q3k whereby the product is determined by the defining relations ·2 ·2 1 Z =] = - , ij = -ji = k. In fact he was inspired by the beautiful geometric model of the complex numbers in which rotations are represented by simple multiplications z ----t az. His goal was to obtain an algebra structure for three dimensional visual space with in particular the possibility of representing a