Sir William Rowan Hamilton

During his undergraduate days in college, William Rowan Hamilton got involved with three different women and ultimately married the third.

In 1824, he met Catherine who belonged to the Disney family he and his uncle were visiting in Summerhill and fell madly in love with her. He could not propose to her as he was still an undergraduate at ‘Trinity College’. He was deeply hurt when her mother announced in February 1825 that she had got married to a clergyman. He wanted to commit suicide due to his anguish and turned to poetry to get relief.

He met Ellen de Vere in July 1830 and wanted to marry her but she did not want to leave Curragh after marriage which discouraged him from pursuing the thought.

William Rowan Hamilton was born in Dublin, Ireland, on August 4, 1805.

His father was a solicitor named Archibald Hamilton and his mother was Sarah Hutton.

He was the fourth child of the nine children born into the family. When he was around two years old he was put under the care of his uncle Reverend James Hamilton who was an Anglican priest and a linguist.

By the age of three he had picked up the English language quite well and by five,he had learnt Hebrew and Greek. Under his uncle’s expert linguistic tutelage he also learnt Italian, German, Spanish and French many otherAsian languages such as Arabic, Sanskrit, Persian, Hindustani and also Malay.

At the age of ten he came across some mathematical papers written in Latin by the Greek mathematician named Euclid, the father of geometry, who lived in 300 B.C. He read Euclid’s works and developed a taste for geometry.

Sir William Rowan Hamilton submitted a paper on ‘caustics’ to the ‘Royal Irish Academy’ in 1824.

In 1827 the committee involved in judging the paper for its authenticity and merit requested him to submit a more elaborate paper based on the paper he had submitted earlier. As a result he submitted a paper titled ‘Theory of Systems of Rays’ to the committee. It described how a mirror with a proper curvature could be used to focus a large number of orthogonal light rays into a single point.

This paper made him quite famous in the academic world even though he was still an undergraduate and he was appointed to the chair of professor of astronomy in the ‘University of Dublin’ in 1827 when he was barely twenty-two years old. He moved to the ‘Dunsink Observatory’ to take up residence there.

He spent the next seven years lecturing on different subjects of astronomy which held his audiences spellbound and became friends with many people including poets like William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

On October 16, 1843,Hamilton was walking with his wife on the banks of the Royal Canal in Dublin when he realized all of a sudden that the solution to three-dimensional geometry lay in quadruplets and not in triplets as it was thought earlier.

The same year he put forward the definition of the term ‘quaternions’ to the ‘Royal Irish Academy’ and started lecturing on the ‘algebra of quaternions’ from 1848.

In 1856 he studied the closed paths on the edges of ‘Platonic solids’ such as a dodecahedron which come to a vertex once only. These closed paths later on came to be known as ‘Hamiltonian circuits’ and the concept was called ‘Icosian Calculus’.