Quaternions to Vector Analysis

by Kathy Joseph

I just finished a video on a history of the quaternions and a biography of their inventor, William Rowan Hamilton. In it, I stated, I hope pretty convincingly, that the basic features of vector algebra ALL came from Hamilton: the scalar, the vector, the dot product (or, at least the negative of the dot product), the cross product, the del function (also called the Nabla function), the divergence (or at least the negative of the divergence) and the curl all were created i...