Abstract
Considered a child prodigy, William Rowan Hamilton could read Hebrew, Latin, and Greek at the tender age of five and had undertaken the study of at least six other languages before his twelfth birthday. The native of Dublin, Ireland, lived with and was educated by an uncle who was an Anglican priest, because his father's legal career required him to spend much of his time in England. In his youth, Hamilton was introduced to Zerah Colburn, an American mathematical prodigy who exhibited his amazing calculating dexterity for entertainment. Competitive bouts of computations between the young men apparently inspired Hamilton to increase his knowledge of mathematics, and he embarked on a course of study that included the works of Euclid, Clairaut, Lloyd, Newton, Lagrange, and Laplace. By 1822, his mathematical abilities had advanced to such an extent that he discovered an important error in Laplace's treatise Celestial Mechanics, a feat that garnered him the attention of the Royal Astronomer of Ireland, John Brinkley, who he would shortly thereafter replace.
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