langreiter.com plain, simple: history-of-vector-analysis

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history-of-vector-analysis

CREATED BY chris • LAST EDITED BY chris 6502 days AGO

Timeline (based on Michael J. Crowe's History of Vectors talk)

1545: Girolamo Cardano, [create Ars Magna]: [create Complex Number]s
1679: Gottfried Leibniz, Letter¹: Geometry of Position
1687: [create Isaac Newton], Principia Mathematica: Parallelogram of Forces
1799: [create Caspar Wessel]: Geometrical Representation of [create Complex Number]s
1799: Carl Friedrich Gauss: ditto, publishes results in 1831.
1806: [create Jean Robert Argand], [create Abbé Buée] (ind.): ditto.
1828: [create John Warren], [create C. V. Mourey] (ind.): ditto.
1831: Gauss (see above); the idea finally attracts wide-spread attention.
1835: [create Giusto Bellavitis]: Equipollences
1837: [create William Hamilton]: Complex Numbers as ordered couples.
1840: Hermann Grassmann, Theorie der Ebbe und Flut: Spatial Analysis²
1841: Hamilton: [create Quaternion]s
1844: Grassmann: [create Die lineale Ausdehnungslehre]³
1846: Hamilton introduces the terms scalar and vector.
1853: Hamilton: [create Lectures on Quaternions]
1853: [create Augustin Cauchy]: Publishes results eerily similar to Grassmann's.
1862: Grassmann republishes his work as [create Die Ausdehnungslehre]⁴
1867: [create Peter Guthrie Tait], Elementary Treatise of Quaternions: Physical Applications
1867: Tait & [create William Thomson]: [create Treatise on Natural Philosophy]

¹ To [create Christiaan Huygens].
² Contains equivalents to the modern outer and inner products ("linear product").
³ Möbius: "unreadable", Baltzer: "[makes me feel] dizzy and to see sky blue before my eyes" &c.; not a great success.
⁴ Grassmann, 1877: "This new work met with even less attention than the first."