Ampère, ANDRÉ MARIE

Ampère, ANDRÉ MARIE, a distinguished mathematician and physicist, was born at Lyons in 1775. The guillotining of his father in 1793 made a deep and melancholy impression on young Ampère, who sought for solace in the study of nature and antiquity. In 1805, after he had been engaged for four years as a lecturer at Bourg and Lyons, he was called to Paris, where he distinguished himself as an able teacher in the Polytechnic School, having already begun his career as an author by his Considérations sur la Théorie Mathématique du Jeu (1802). In 1814 he became a member of the Academy of Sciences; in 1824, professor of Experimental Physics in the Collège de France. He died at Marseilles, June 10, 1836. Scientific progress is largely indebted to Ampère, especially for his electro-dynamic theory and his original views of the identity of electricity and magnetism, as given in his Recueil d'Observations Electro-dynamiques (1822), and his Théorie des Phénomènes Electro-dynamiques (1830). These researches prepared the way for Faraday's experiments. See his Journal et Correspondance, 1793-1805 (7th ed. 1877); André Marie Ampère et Jean Jacques Ampère; Correspondance et Souvenirs (2 vols. 1875); and St Hilaire's Philosophie des Deux Ampères (1866).