, he analysed the principle of
geometric addition of forces in his treatise DeBeghinselen der Weeghconst
(“Principles of the Art of Weighing”), which caused a major breakthrough in the
development of mechanics But it took another 200 years for the general concept
of vectors to form In the 1880, Josaih Willard Gibbs (1839-1903), an American physicist
and mathematician, and Oliver Heaviside (1850-1925), an English engineer, created
what we now know as vector analysis, essentially by separating the real (scalar)
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part of quaternion from its imaginary (vector) part In 1881 and 1884, Gibbs
printed a treatise entitled Element of Vector Analysis