A History of Vector Analysis: The Evolution of the Idea of a Vectorial System

On October 16, 1843, Sir William Rowan Hamilton discovered quaternions and, on the very same day, presented his breakthrough to the Royal Irish Academy. Meanwhile, in a less dramatic style, a German high school teacher, Hermann Grassmann, was developing another vectorial system involving hypercomplex numbers comparable to quaternions. The creations of these two mathematicians led to other vectorial systems, most notably the system of vector analysis formulated by Josiah Willard Gibbs and Ol...