William Kingdon CliffordDied 3 Mar 1879 at age 33 (born 4 May 1845). British philosopher and mathematician who developed the theory of biquaternions (a generalization of the Irish mathematician Sir William Rowan Hamilton's theory of quaternions) and then linked them with more general associative algebras. In 1870, he survived a shipwreck near Sicily while on an expedition to Italy to obtain scientific data from an eclipse. Influenced by the work of Riemann and Lobachevsky, Clifford studied non-euclidean geometry. In 1870 he wrote On the Space Theory of Matter in which he argued that energy and matter are simply different types of curvature of space. In this work he presented ideas which were to form a fundamental role in Einstein's general theory of relativity. |
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