i
j
k
a
b
c
a
b
c
Historical Note
The word vector has been derived from a Latin word vectus, which means
“to carry” The germinal ideas of modern vector theory date from around 1800
when Caspar Wessel (1745-1818) and Jean Robert Argand (1768-1822) described
that how a complex number a + ib could be given a geometric interpretation with
the help of a directed line segment in a coordinate plane 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