Irish mathematician and astronomer (1805-1865)
Sir William Rowan Hamilton (4 August 1805 – 2 September 1865) was an Irish physicist, astronomer, and mathematician, who made important contributions to classical mechanics, optics, and algebra. His studies of mechanical and optical systems led him to discover new mathematical concepts and techniques. His greatest contribution is perhaps the reformulation of Newtonian mechanics, now called Hamiltonian mechanics. This work has proven central to the modern study of classical field theories such as electromagnetism, and to the development of quantum mechanics. In mathematics, he is perhaps best known for his discovery of quaternions.
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What exactly is mathematics? Many have tried but nobody has really succeeded in defining mathematics; it is always something else. ...[P]eople know that it deals with numbers and figures, with patterns, relations, operations, and that its formal procedures involving axioms, proofs, lemmas, theorems have not changed since the time of Archimedes. ... that it purports to form the foundations of all rational thought. ...The aesthetic side of mathematics has been of overwhelming importance throughout its growth. It is not so much whether a theorem is useful that matters, but how elegant it is. ...One can ...look conversely at ...the homely side of mathematics ...having to be punctilious ...having to make sure of every step. ...[O]ne cannot stop at drawing with a big, wide brush; all the details have to be filled in ...Mathematicians ...fool themselves ...when they think their main business is to prove theorems without at least indicating why they may be important. If left entirely to the aesthetic criteria, doesn't it compound the mystery? ...[I]n the decades to come there will be more understanding ...of the degree of beauty, though ...the criteria may have shifted ...[to] a super beauty in unanalyzable higher levels. ...It has to appeal to connections with other theories of the external world or to the history of the development of the human brain, or else it is purely aesthetic and very subjective in the sense that music is. ...[E]ven the quality of music will be analyzable ...by mathematizing the idea of analogy.
I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be.
Any author who uses mathematics should always express in ordinary language the meaning of the assumptions he admits, as well as the significance of the results obtained. The more abstract his theory, the more imperative this obligation. In fact, mathematics are and can only be a tool to explore reality. In this exploration, mathematics do not constitute an end in itself, they are and can only be a means.