Imagine winding the hour hand of a clock back from 3 o’clock to noon. Mathematicians have long known how to describe this rotation as a simple multiplication: A number representing the initial ...

If you have data gathered in one coordinate system and want to express them in terms of a different coordinate system, you probably would use a translation vector and a rotation matrix. You can, ...

A forgotten number system invented in the 19th century may provide the simplest explanation for why our universe could have 10 dimensions As children, we all learn about numbers. We start with ...

It’s 179 years since William Rowan Hamilton really put Ireland on the maths map by inventing quaternions. This is a four-dimensional number system with a highly usual property as the order in which ...

Irish physicist, astronomer, and mathematician Sir William Rowan Hamilton introduced quaternions, a non-commutative extension of complex numbers, on October 16, 1843. Benjamin Olinde Rodrigues had ...