History of Vectors
The general ideas of vectors have been around for a very long time. The idea of vectors, although not called such, appeared in Aristotle's time.
The parallelogram law (which we use to add vectors) was the 1st corollary in Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica.
Newton referred to them as "vectorial entities" which helped build the foundation to the vector analysis that we know and love today.
Vectors as we know them really started developing in the 19th and 20th centuries. The concept began developing seriously
with Caspar Wessel, Jean Robert Argand, and Carl Friedrich Gauss as they began to consider complex numbers as points in 2D space, hence 2D vectors.
Their work also led to the development of ordered pairs to represent points in 2D space.
In 1827, August Ferdinand, a German mathematician, introduced the idea of directed line segments in the publication of one of his books.
These directed line segments were essentially vectors with a different name.
Around the same time, Sir William Hamilton developed his own take on vectors, calling them quaternions. These quaternions were very similar to the present day vectors
in that Hamilton recognized that they could be multiplied by scalars, he used them for algebra, and he was able to represent them geometrically.
Hermann Grassman did us all a great favor when he shared his thoughts on expanding vectors into n-dimensions.
He also anticipated modern day matrix and linear algebra and vector analysis. James Maxwell , a Scottish scientist, coined the terms scalars
and vectors in the early '. The concepts of dot product and cross product were
introduced in the mid 1800's by William Kingdom Clifford.
Vector Analysis like we know it today is attributed to a Yale professor, J. Willard Gibbs, who distributed notes to
his classes and others on the vectors. Gibbs used vectors to aid his study in electromagnetism and physics.