For math scholars, there’s even more. This Tea Party is an extended discourse on the work of Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton, who discovered an abstract concept called quaternions, a complex number configuration that relied on four terms. His work proved significant for …

In Carroll’s tea party, the Doormouse, the Mad Hatter, and the March Hare are all going in a circle around a table in a perpetual tea time as Carroll took away the fourth member of their party, Time. Melanie Bayley believes that the Mad Tea Party is a reference to the work of mathematician William Rowan Hamilton: “[H]is discovery of quaternions in 1843 was being hailed as an important milestone in abstract algebra, since they allowed rotations to be calculated algebraically. This, Bayley surmises, explores the work of the Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton, who died in 1865, just after Alice was published.

In the mid-1800s, mathematician William Rowan Hamilton had come up … The Mad Hatter and the March Hare champion the mathematics of William Rowan Hamilton, one of the great innovators in Victorian algebra. However, for years Hamilton worked with three terms and found that they could only be made to establish a rotation of the terms on a flat plane – like … Quote: Alice, angry now at the strange turn of events, leaves the Duchess’s house and wanders into the Mad Hatter’s tea party. Alice, angry now at the strange turn of events, leaves the Duchess’s house and wanders into the Mad Hatter’s tea party, which explores the work of the Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton. Sir William Rowan Hamilton, (born August 3/4, 1805, Dublin, Ireland—died September 2, 1865, Dublin), Irish mathematician who contributed to the development of optics, dynamics, and algebra —in particular, discovering the algebra of quaternions.