André-Marie Ampère. Biography

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André-Marie Ampère (1775-1836). Biography of a scientist

Directory / The life of remarkable physicists

André-Marie Ampère (1775-1836)
Andre-Marie Ampere

André-Marie Ampère is an outstanding French mathematician and physicist who made a number of discoveries in the field of electromagnetism. For these discoveries, grateful humanity named the unit of current after him.

Ampère was born on January 20, 1775 in the village of Polimier near Lyon. His father was a fairly wealthy man and had the opportunity to give his son a versatile education. The boy became interested in mathematics early and at the age of 13 he sent his first work to the Lyon Academy. At this time, Lagrange's book "Analytical Mechanics" fell into his hands. Ampère was so carried away by her that he repeated all the mathematical calculations.

The serene life soon ended. During the French Revolution in 1792, Lyon refused to follow orders from Paris. After a two-month siege, the city was taken and a number of its citizens, including Ampère's father, were executed. The young man Ampère had to earn his living by teaching mathematics and physics. His authority gradually grew, and in 1802 he was invited as a professor of physics and chemistry at the Central School in Burg. Here he wrote and published his first major work, "The Mathematical Theory of Games" (1803). In 1803, on the recommendation of d'Alembert, he moved to the post of professor of mathematics at the Lyon Lyceum, then moved to Paris, where he taught at the Polytechnic School, in 1809 Mr. Ampère became a professor of mathematics there. Here he continued to work fruitfully.

For his work on partial differential equations, Ampère was elected in 1814 to the National Academy of Sciences. In the field of chemistry, he made the first attempt to classify the chemical elements. In the field of physics, Ampère worked on the diffraction of light and published a number of papers on this subject. In 1820, the Danish physicist Hans Christian Oersted accidentally noticed that if a current passes through a wire, then the arrow of a nearby compass deviates. At a meeting of the academy on September 4, 1820, Oersted's experience was demonstrated. And by the end of September, Ampère reported on the discovery of attractive forces between two parallel current-carrying conductors.

Continuing these experiments, Ampere discovered that a coil with current acts like a permanent magnet (later, working in this direction, Michael Faraday discovered the phenomenon of electromagnetic induction). Ampere invented a device with a freely suspended needle, which deviated under the action of current through the coil, and the deviation was the greater, the greater the current. The improvement of this device led to the appearance of a measuring instrument - a galvanometer. But even working with his prototype, Ampère established that current flows in a closed electrical circuit. Subsequently, Kirchhoff and Ohm established the laws of electrical circuits.

Ampère's most important publication in the field of electricity and magnetism was the Memoir on the Mathematical Theory of Electrodynamic Phenomena, published in 1827. In particular, Ampère's law was formulated in it, which related the current strength in a conductor and magnetic induction. The ideas set forth in this fundamental work were then developed in the works of Weber, Maxwell, Thompson. It can be considered that Ampère opened the doors to such a wide field of knowledge as electromagnetism.

In 1826, Ampère was appointed head of the department of physics at the Sorbonne University, which he held until the end of his life. In 1827 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of England (an honor very rarely awarded to foreign scientists). His authority among European physicists was indisputable.

Many years later, Maxwell wrote: "It is impossible to imagine how, from his experiments, Ampère could formulate his law in such amazing mathematical form." This could be because Ampère was both a brilliant experimenter and a brilliant theorist. The memory of André-Marie Ampère is immortalized: one of the mountains on the Moon bears his name, in Paris a street is named after him. But the main thing is that any of us, measuring the current strength in an electrical circuit, pronounces his name.

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