“Symmetrical equations are good in their place, but ‘vector’ is a useless survival, or offshoot from quaternions, and has never been of the slightest use to any

“Symmetrical equations are good in their place, but ‘vector’ is a useless survival, or offshoot from quaternions, and has never been of the slightest use to any creature.” — William Thompson, 1st Baron Kelvin (better known as Lord Kelvin) Letter to G. F. FitzGerald (1896) as quoted in A History of Vector Analysis: The Evolution of the Idea of a Vectorial System (1994) by Michael J. Crowe, p. 120