Tamara HernandezMr. BestMath 133April 22, 2014Sir William Rowan Hamilton was born on August 4, 1805, in Dublin, Ireland. His remarkable intelligence developed from the age of 3, and he made many successful contributions in mathematics and science. Hamilton excelled in the dynamic world of mathematics and science, such as geometric optics, quaternions, the Cayley-Hamilton theorem, and Hamiltonian mechanics. On April 23, 1827, while studying geometric optics, Hamilton discovered the theory of the ray system. The ray system theory helped determine how light travels through wave energy. "The theory of ray systems proves that a system of light rays filling a region of space can be focused to a single point by a suitably curved mirror if and only if these light rays are orthogonal to a series of surfaces" ( Theory of ray systems). Systems of Rays) written by the editors of the Encyclopedia Britannica. In 1857, Hamilton developed a new mathematical concept known as quaternions. Quaternions are a complex algebraic number system that includes multiplication of real and imag numbers...