William Rowan Hamilton

Irish physicist, astronomer, and mathematician




  • It may not sound very consistent with any such professed humility on my part, if I say to you that, after having served for the Quaternions during fourteen years, and having (as America seems to think) won my Rachel—to be my own by an intellectual marriage—I now wish to wind up several scientific projects, from which those quaternions had for a long time diverted me; and feel as if I were entering, or had already entered, on a new harvest of labour and reputation. As to Fame, if it have not been won or earned already, it is not likely that any future exertion will make it mine.
    But as to the Labour; that is a thing within everybody's power to judge of, even for himself. I have very long admired Ptolemy's description of his great astronomical Master, Hipparchus... "a labour-loving and truth-loving man." Be such my epitaph.
    • Letter to Mrs. Wilde, (February 11, 1858) as quoted by Robert Percival Graves, Life of Sir William Rowan Hamilton (1889) Vol.3, p. 230
    • in a letter to his son (dated August 5, 1865), describing his discovery of quaternions on October 16, 1843.

Quotes about HamiltonEdit

  • To the scientists of 1850, Hamilton's principle was the realization of a dream. ...from the time of Galileo scientists had been striving to deduce as many phenomena of nature as possible from a few fundamental physical principles. ...they made striking progress ...But even before these successes were achieved Descartes had already expressed the hope and expectation that all the laws of science would be derivable from a single basic law of the universe. This hope became a driving force in the late eighteenth century after Maupertuis's and Euler's work showed that optics and mechanics could very likely be unified under one principle. Hamilton's achievement in encompassing the most developed and largest branches of physical science, mechanics, optics, electricity, and magnetism under one principle was therefore regarded as the pinnacle of mathematical physics.
  • The minimum principle that unified the knowledge of light, gravitation, and electricity of Hamilton's time no longer suffices to relate these fundamental branches of physics. Within fifty years of its creation, the belief that Hamilton's principle would outlive all other physical laws of physics was shattered. Minimum principles have since been created for separate branches of physics... but these are not only restricted... but seem to be contrived...
    A single minimum principle, a universal law governing all processes in nature, is still the direction in which the search for simplicity is headed, with the price of simplicity now raised from a mastery of differential equations to a mastery of the calculus of variations.

"Sir W. R. Hamilton" (January, 1866)Edit

Augustus De Morgan, Gentleman's Magazine, Vol. 220
  • Hamilton was a man who combined different talents to an extent which is often attributed, by exaggeration, to the possessor of one powerful faculty: but in his case there is abundant evidence. He was scholar, poet, metaphysician, mathematician, and natural philosopher. Highly imaginative and fluent of tongue, he was an orator in all that he knew; even in mathematics, to the details of which he could give almost a rhetorical cast in a letter. In metaphysics he was very well read, and could talk in a way which suggested a comparison to Southey, and a difference. Hamilton one day preached to Southey on this subject until the latter remarked, as they passed a ploughman, "If you had been Coleridge, you would have talked to that ploughman just as you have been talking to me."
  • Hamilton was not only an Irishman, but Irish: and this with curious oppositions of character. He was a non-combatant: there was too much kindness in his disposition to allow any fight to show itself. Impulsive and enthusiastic, with strong opinions and new views, he was never engaged in a scientific controversy... William Rowan Hamilton's preservative was his dread of wounding the feelings of others. In his youth, "Defender of the Absent" was his nickname. ...He had a morbid fear of being a plagiarist; and the letters which he wrote to those who had treated like subjects with himself sometimes contained curious and far-fetched misgivings about his own priority. But, with all this, there was a touch of the national temperament in him... an Irishman who never gets into a row may give quick but quiet symptoms of opposition of opinion, and of what, were it more than a rudiment, would be called pugnacity.
  • Hamilton was apt to work by fits and starts. He has been known several times to work fourteen hours in one day, standing nearly all the while; but there were intervals of comparative inaction... Sometimes a letter was written and copied which was not sent for months, and then only the first sheet, with promise of the rest. It has even happened that the letter was knowingly never forwarded at all, and that when, long after, he found reason to wish to send it, he could not find it and sent the copy instead.

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