Download or read book Great Astronomers written by Robert Stawell Ball and published by . This book was released on 2019-12-03 with total page 46 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sir William Rowan Hamilton (1805-1865) was an Irish physicist, astronomer, and mathematician who made important contributions to mechanics, optics, and algebra. As a teenager, he mastered parts of Newton's Principia and studied Laplace's celestial mechanics treatise.