William Rowen Hamilton
(1805-1865) an Irish mathematician was the first to use the term vector for a
directed line segment in his book Lectures on Quaternions (1853) Hamilton’s
method of quaternions (an ordered set of four real numbers given as:
ˆ
ˆ
ˆ
ˆ
ˆ ˆ
, , ,
a
bi
cj
dk i
j k
+
+
+
 following certain algebraic rules) was a solution to the
problem of multiplying vectors in three dimensional space Though, we must
mention here that in practice, the idea of vector concept and their addition was
known much earlier ever since the time of Aristotle (384-322 B C