Quaternions: A herald of modern algebra (TEFC)

Episode of Series “History of Mathematics”. A key mathematical development in modern algebraic ideas was the discovery of non-commutative algebras. William Rowan Hamilton worked on complex numbers and expressed them formally as pairs of real numbers. His work led him to try to generalise his ideas to three dimension but his generalisation to four dimensions led to the quaternion and the first non-commutative algebra.