According to the story Hamilton told, on October 16, he was out walking along the Royal Canal in Dublin with his wife when the solution suddenly occurred to him; Hamilton then promptly carved this equation into the side of the nearby Brougham Bridge (now called Broom Bridge).
Since 1989, the Department of Mathematics of the National University of Ireland, Maynooth has organized a pilgrimage, where scientists (including physicists Murray Gell-Mann in 2002 and Steven Weinberg in 2005 and mathematician Andrew Wiles in 2003) take a walk from Dunsink Observatory to the Royal Canal bridge where, unfortunately, no trace of Hamilton's carving remains.
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternion
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
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