Sir William Rowan Hamilton LL.D, DCL, MRIA, FRAS (3/4 August 1805 – 2 September 1865) was an Irish mathematician, astronomer, and physicist. He was the Andrews Professor of Astronomy at Trinity College Dublin, and Royal Astronomer of Ireland, living at Dunsink Observatory. Hamilton's scientific career included the study of geometrical optics, ideas from Fourier analysis, and his work on quaternions which made him one of the founders of modern linear algebra. He made major contributions in optics, classical mechanics and abstract algebra. His work was fundamental to modern theoretical physics, particularly his reformulation of Newtonian mechanics, now called Hamiltonian mechanics. It is now central both to electromagnetism and to quantum mechanics. Early life Hamilton was the fourth of nine children born to Sarah Hutton (1780–1817) and Archibald Hamilton (1778–1819), who lived in Dublin at 29 Dominick Street, later renumbered to 36. Hamilton's father, who was from Dublin, worked as a solicitor. By the age of three, Hamilton had been sent to live with his uncle James Hamilton, a graduate of Trinity College who ran a school in Talbots Castle in Trim, Co. Meath. Hamilton is said to have shown talent at an early age. His uncle observed that Hamilton, from a young age, had displayed an uncanny ability to acquire languages. This has been disputed by some historians, who claim he had only a basic understanding of them. At the age of seven, he had already made progress in Hebrew, and before he was 13 he had acquired, under the care of his uncle a dozen languages: classical and modern European languages, Persian, Arabic, Hindustani, Sanskrit, Marathi and Malay. The emphasis on languages is attributed to the wish of Hamilton's father to see his son employed by the British East India Company. An expert mental calculator, the young Hamilton was capable of working out the result of some calculations to many decimal places. In September 1813, an American calculating prodigy, Zerah Colburn, was being exhibited in Dublin. Colburn was 9, a year older than Hamilton.The two were pitted against each other in a mental arithmetic contest, with Colburn emerging the clear victor. In reaction to his defeat, Hamilton spent less time studying languages, and more on mathematics. At age ten, he stumbled across a Latin copy of Euclid; and at twelve he studied Newton's Arithmetica Universalis. He moved on to read the Principia, and by age 16 he had covered