There seems to be little connection between Quaternions and Mountains but Charles Jasper Joly was a man who combined a deep knowledge and love of both. (What are 'quaternions' - you might well ask. According to Wikipedia they are: A type of four-dimensional hypercomplex number consisting of a real part and three imaginary parts and are commonly used in vector mathematics and as an alternative to matrix algebra in calculating the rotation of three-dimensional objects. Quaternions were first described by the Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton in 1843 and applied to mechanics in three-dimensional space and also have practical uses in applied mathematics, particularly for calculations involving three-dimensional rotations, such as in three-dimensional computer graphics, computer vision, magnetic resonance.)
Born in County Offaly in 1864, at St Catherine's Rectory where his father was Rector, ( The land for the rectory had been provided by the town's landlord Charles William Bury, whose family will enter our story later.) Joly's first school was in Portarlington before attending
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| Weissmies (Wikipedia) |
Galway Grammar School and entering Trinity College in 1882 from where he graduated in mathematics and experimental physics in 1886. After this he went to Berlin to follow his interest in experimental physics in the laboratory of Herman von Helmholtz ( as had John Tyndall, some 30 years earlier). It may have been here that his interest in mountaineering began. He returned to Ireland on the death of his father and his first Alpine exploit seems to have been in 1892 on a visit to Switzerland when he climbed the Weissmies and crossed the Alhubeljoch.
His climbs of that year and the following two seasons were his qualifying achievements for membership of the Alpine Club to which he was elected in 1895 where he was proposed and seconded by two other Irish members and Trinity graduates - George Scriven and William Spotswood Green.
Rock climbing was of special interest and he spent some of his happiest mountain holidays among the the Dolomites around Cortina and San Martino. Despite a delicate appearance he possessed endurance, courage, and a keen sense of humour, once leading a group successfully down from the Eiger in a snowstorm.
In 1897 he was appointed Royal Astronomer of Ireland and lived at Dunsink observatory until his early death from typhoid in 1906. By then he had published on mathematics and astronomy; one of his most important works was Manual of Quaternions (1905), brought out in the centenary year of Hamilton's birth.
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| Alpine Club |
For further biographical details see DIB Home
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