Alexander McAulay

Alexander McAulay (1863 to 1931) was a mathematician and physicist who became the first professor of mathematics and physics at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia. He was educated at Kingswood School in Bath and at Caius College, Cambridge, where he took up the quaternion algebra and graduated in 1886. From 1888 to 1895 he lectured at Ormond College, University of Melbourne, and in 1893 published Utility of Quaternions in Physics, a book praised by Peter Guthrie Tait for catching the full spirit of the quaternion system. He took the Tasmanian chair in 1896. Following William Kingdon Clifford, who had extended quaternions to dual quaternions, McAulay made a special study of this number system, which he called octonions or Clifford biquaternions, and set out his results in Octonions: a Development of Clifford's Biquaternions (Cambridge University Press, 1898). He stopped teaching in 1924 because of failing sight, stayed on as research professor until 1929, and died at his home in Sandy Bay, Tasmania. His brother Francis Sowerby Macaulay also contributed to ring theory.