In 1975, on this sad day the celebrated quaternion mathematician Éamon de Valera passed away in Dublin aged ninety-two. Born in New York City to an Irish mother; his parents, Catherine Coll (subsequently Mrs Wheelwright), an immigrant from Bruree, County Limerick, and Juan Vivion de Valera, a Cuban settler and sculptor of Spanish descent. But he moved back to Ireland at the age of two.



Dev has his Vision of MathematicsAlways a diligent student, at the end of his first year in Blackrock College he was Student of the Year. He also won further scholarships and exhibitions and in 1903 was appointed teacher of mathematics at Rockwell College, County Tipperary. It was here that de Valera was first given the nickname "Dev" by a teaching colleague, Tom O'Donnell. In 1904, he graduated in mathematics from the Royal University of Ireland. He then studied for a year at Trinity College Dublin.



He developed a passion for Quaternions which were introduced by Irish mathematician Sir William Rowan Hamilton in 1843. Hamilton was looking for ways of extending complex numbers (which can be viewed as points on a plane) to higher spatial dimensions. He could not do so for 3 dimensions, but 4 dimensions produce quaternions. 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 in the form of the equation suddenly occurred to him; Hamilton then promptly carved this equation into the side of the nearby Brougham Bridge (now called Broom Bridge). This involved abandoning the commutative law, a radical step for the time.



By the turn of the twentieth century there was already in place a physical theory uniting gravity and electromagnetism. And when the weak and strong nuclear forces are discovered decades later the application of a still more general set of numbers called the octonions O would be applied to describe them as well. In other words, gravity and the Standard Model of quantum physics would be united in the 1950s. But much of this was due to the tireless work of de Valera in taking forward Hamilton's work in quaternion mathematics.