Quad (figure skating)
A quad, or quadruple, is a figure skating jump with at least three but less than four revolutions. Most quadruple jumps have 3 1/2 revolutions; the quadruple Axel has 4 1/2 revolutions, although no figure skater to date has completed this jump in competition. The quadruple toe loop and quadruple Salchow are the two most commonly skated in the discipline. Quadruple jumps have become increasingly common among World and Olympic level men's single skaters, to the point that not having one in a program has come to be seen as a severe handicap. The first person to land a ratified quadruple jump in competition was Canadian Kurt Browning in 1988. In 2002, Miki Ando became the first woman to do so, and she remains one of only two women to have landed a ratified quadruple jump in competition.
William Rowan Hamilton
Hamilton was looking for ways of extending complex numbers (which can be viewed as points on a 2-dimensional plane) to higher spatial dimensions. 
He failed to find a useful 3-dimensional system (in modern terminology, he failed to find a real, three-dimensional skew-field), but in working with four dimensions he created quaternions. According to Hamilton, on 16 October he was out walking along the Royal Canal in Dublin with his wife when the solution in the form of the equation