Quotations

André-Marie Ampère


View the biography of André-Marie Ampère


The future science of government should be called "la cybernétique" (1843)
Quoted in A L Mackay, Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (London 1994)
Either one or the other [analysis or synthesis] may be direct or indirect. The direct procedure is when the point of departure is known-direct synthesis in the elements of geometry. By combining at random simple truths with each other, more complicated ones are deduced from them. This is the method of discovery, the special method of inventions, contrary to popular opinion.
[Ampère gives this example drawn from geometry to illustrate his meaning for 
direct synthesis
when deductions following from more simple, already-known theorems leads to a new discovery.]
In J R Hofmann, André-Marie Ampère (1996)
Ordinarily logic is divided into the examination of ideas, judgments, arguments, and methods. The two latter are generally reduced to judgments, that is, arguments are reduced to apodictic judgments that such and such conclusions follow from such and such premises, and method is reduced to judgments that prescribe the procedure that should be followed in the search for truth.
[Ampère expresses how arguments have a logical structure which he expected should be applied to relate scientific theories to experimental evidence.]
In J R Hofmann, André-Marie Ampère (1996)
There is synthesis when, in combining therein judgments that are made known to us from simpler relations, one deduces judgments from them relative to more complicated relations.
There is analysis when from a complicated truth one deduces more simple truths.
In J R Hofmann, André-Marie Ampère (1996)
Quotes by others about Ampère

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 Ampère, 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.
Camille Flammarion in Popular Astronomy: a General Description of the Heavens (1884)
The experimental investigation by which Ampère 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.
James Clerk Maxwell in A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism (1873)