Thumbnail of André-Marie Ampère
André-Marie Ampère
(22 Jan 1775 - 10 Jun 1836)

French mathematician, physicist and chemist.


Science Quotes by André-Marie Ampère (1)

The future science of government should be called 'la cybernétique' (1843)
Coining the French word to mean 'the art of governing,' from the Greek (Kybernetes = navigator or steersman), subsequently adopted as cybernetics by Norbert Weiner for the field of control and communication theory.
— André-Marie Ampère
Essai sur la philosophie des sciences, ou Exposition analytique d'une classification naturelle de toutes les connaissances humaines (1834). Quoted http://www.control.lth.se/news/cyber.html. Information for English origin from Oxford English Dictionary.
See also:  |  Cybernetics (2)  |  Government (28)  |  Nomenclature (51)



Quotes by others about André-Marie Ampère (4)

Ampère was a mathematician of various resources & I think might rather be called excentric [sic] than original. He was as it were always mounted upon a hobby horse of a monstrous character pushing the most remote & distant analogies. This hobby horse was sometimes like that of a child ['s] made of heavy wood, at other times it resembled those [?] shapes [?] used in the theatre [?] & at other times it was like a hypogrif in a pantomime de imagie. He had a sort of faith in animal magnetism & has published some refined & ingenious memoirs to prove the identity of electricity & magnetism but even in these views he is rather as I said before excentric than original. He has always appeared to me to possess a very discursive imagination & but little accuracy of observation or acuteness of research.
'Davy's Sketches of his Contemporaries', Chymia, 1967, 12, 135-6.
See also:  |  Mathematician (66)  |  Personality (6)

Ohm found that the results could be summed up in such a simple law that he who runs may read it, and a schoolboy now can predict what a Faraday then could only guess at roughly. By Ohm's discovery a large part of the domain of electricity became annexed by Coulomb's discovery of the law of inverse squares, and completely annexed by Green's investigations. Poisson attacked the difficult problem of induced magnetisation, and his results, though differently expressed, are still the theory, as a most important first approximation. Ampere brought a multitude of phenomena into theory by his investigations of the mechanical forces between conductors supporting currents and magnets. Then there were the remarkable researches of Faraday, the prince of experimentalists, on electrostatics and electrodynamics and the induction of currents. These were rather long in being brought from the crude experimental state to a compact system, expressing the real essence. Unfortunately, in my opinion, Faraday was not a mathematician. It can scarely be doubted that had he been one, he would have anticipated much later work. He would, for instance, knowing Ampere's theory, by his own results have readily been led to Neumann's theory, and the connected work of Helmholtz and Thomson. But it is perhaps too much to expect a man to be both the prince of experimentalists and a competent mathematician.
Electromagnetic Theory (1893), Vol. 1, 14.
See also:  |  Charles-Augustin de Coulomb (2)  |  Electromagnetism (8)  |  Michael Faraday (39)  |  Hermann von Helmholtz (15)  |  Law (134)  |  Mathematician (66)  |  John von Neumann (5)  |  Siméon-Denis Poisson (2)  |  Sir J.J. Thomson (3)

Always preoccupied with his profound researches, the great Newton showed in the ordinary-affairs of life an absence of mind which has become proverbial. It is related that one day, wishing to find the number of seconds necessary for the boiling of an egg, he perceived, after waiting a minute, that he held the egg in his hand, and had placed his seconds watch (an instrument of great value on account of its mathematical precision) to boil!
This absence of mind reminds one of the mathematician Ampere, who one day, as he was going to his course of lectures, noticed a little pebble on the road; he picked it up, and examined with admiration the mottled veins. All at once the lecture which he ought to be attending to returned to his mind; he drew out his watch; perceiving that the hour approached, he hastily doubled his pace, carefully placed the pebble in his pocket, and threw his watch over the parapet of the Pont des Arts.
Popular Astronomy: a General Description of the Heavens (1884), translated by J. Ellard Gore, (1907), 93.
See also:  |  Anecdote (14)  |  Egg (10)  |  Mind (116)  |  Sir Isaac Newton (82)  |  Pebble (3)  |  Research (208)  |  Watch (4)

The experimental investigation by which Ampere established the law of the mechanical action between electric currents is one of the most brilliant achievements in science. The whole theory and experiment, seems as if it had leaped, full grown and full armed, from the brain of the 'Newton of Electricity'. It is perfect in form, and unassailable in accuracy, and it is summed up in a formula from which all the phenomena may be deduced, and which must always remain the cardinal formula of electro-dynamics.
A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism (1873), Vol. 2, 162.
See also:  |  Accuracy (8)  |  Achievement (33)  |  Brain (58)  |  Cardinal (2)  |  Current (5)  |  Deduction (13)  |  Electricity (30)  |  Electrodynamics (3)  |  Experiment (199)  |  Formula (16)  |  Investigation (25)  |  Law (134)  |  Leap (2)  |  Mechanics (16)  |  Perfection (12)  |  Phenomenon (25)  |  Theory (179)


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