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Afterword

from Algebra and Number Theory

Marlow Anderson
Affiliation:
Colorado College
Victor Katz
Affiliation:
University of the District of Columbia
Robin Wilson
Affiliation:
Open University
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Summary

In chapter 10 of his A History of Algebra [26], B. L. van der Waerden repeats much of what he wrote about Hamilton's discovery of quaternions. Interestingly, there he mentions Caspar Wessel as one of the originators of the geometric interpretation of complex numbers, while in the current article he ignores Wessel. But he also goes on to discuss Cayley's own use of quaternions to describe rotations in three-space, meanwhile pointing out the earlier results of Rodrigues. In addition, he deals with some applications of quaternions to the question of representing integers as sums of four squares. He concludes by discussing Hermann Hankel's 1867 book that presents many of Grassmann's results, but in a form that was easier to understand.

Simon Altmann writes in his article that we know “next to nothing” about Olinde Rodrigues, but in the next fifteen years he remedied this situation, publishing the results in his recent biography, Mathematics and Social Utopias in France: Olinde Rodrigues and His Times [1]. Similarly, Karen Parshall went on to do further research on the life and work of Sylvester. Her results appear in her edition of Sylvester's letters [18] as well as in her magnificent biography of the English mathematician [19].

Israel Kleiner has expanded his paper on group theory and some of his other work on the history of algebra into a new book, A History of Abstract Algebra [15]. Leo Corry's Modern Algebra and the Rise of Mathematical Structures [5] is another recent work that concentrates specifically on the development of abstraction in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but claims that true abstraction did not come into being until the work of Emmy Noether in the 1920s.

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Who Gave You the Epsilon?
And Other Tales of Mathematical History
, pp. 375 - 378
Publisher: Mathematical Association of America
Print publication year: 2009

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  • Afterword
  • Edited by Marlow Anderson, Colorado College, Victor Katz, University of the District of Columbia, Robin Wilson, Open University
  • Book: Who Gave You the Epsilon?
  • Online publication: 26 October 2011
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.5948/UPO9781614445043.044
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  • Afterword
  • Edited by Marlow Anderson, Colorado College, Victor Katz, University of the District of Columbia, Robin Wilson, Open University
  • Book: Who Gave You the Epsilon?
  • Online publication: 26 October 2011
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.5948/UPO9781614445043.044
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Afterword
  • Edited by Marlow Anderson, Colorado College, Victor Katz, University of the District of Columbia, Robin Wilson, Open University
  • Book: Who Gave You the Epsilon?
  • Online publication: 26 October 2011
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.5948/UPO9781614445043.044
Available formats
×