André-Marie Ampère

André-Marie Ampère (Lyons 20 January, 1775 – Marseilles 10 June, 1836) was a French physicist and mathematician. His most important contribution was Ampere's law, which describes the relation between electric current and magnetic field. The unit of electric current ampere is named after him.

Biography

Although André-Marie did not receive a formal education—he was tutored by his farther—he was a child prodigy. At the age of thirteen he submitted his first mathematical paper. This work attempted to solve the problem of constructing a line of the same length as an arc of a circle. However, the work was refused and André-Marie realized that he had to become better skilled in mathematics. So, he read d'Alembert's article on the differential calculus in the Encyclopédie and undertook a study of works by Leonhard Euler. He started to read the 1788 edition of Lagrange's Mécanique analytique and later claimed that he was able to repeat all the calculations in it.

Two years after the French Revolution of 1789 Ampère's father was beheaded by the Jacobins. The effect on André-Marie of his father's death was devastating. He gave up his studies of mathematics and only regained his taste for the sciences after he fell in love with his future wife, Julie. They married in 1799 and their son Jean-Jacques was born in 1800. In 1802 Ampère was appointed teacher of physics and chemistry in Bourg-en-Bresse at the Bourg École Centrale. This was a difficult time for Ampère since Julie became ill and he had to leave her behind in Lyons. Nowadays Lyons and Bourg are seen as close (about 60 km), but in the beginning of the nineteenth century travel was difficult. After his wife died in July 1803, Ampère decided to go to Paris.

References

Paul Jonathan Bruce, The History of Electromagnetic Theory, Ph.D. Thesis, University of Aberdeen, 2005.

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