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Andre Marie Ampere was born in 1775 in Polemieux-au-mont-d’Or near Lyon. Ampere spent much of his childhood in Lyon with his father, Jean-Jacques Ampere. In 1782 though, Jean-Jacques decided that Andre needed to concentrate on his studies. To accommodate for this need, they moved permanently to Polemieux.
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Although Andre never attended school, he received an excellent education. His father did help him in his studies, but he was mostly self-directed, reading articles from L’Encyclopedie for entertainment.
It had been said that Andre mastered all known mathematics by age 12, but this is an exaggeration, for he did not formally study mathematics until age 13. Andre poured himself over his studies of mathematics and soon began to create his own theories and ideas.
While Ampere was still only 13, he attempted to publish a paper to the Academie de Lyon. Due to the fact that he did not study calculus, his paper was not published, but this would prove to be a turning point in his life. Ampere discovered that he needed to learn more math, so again he turned to L’Encyclopedie and d’Alembers article on Calculus. Ampere took calculus lessons from a monk in Lyon and began to study works by Euler, Bernoulli, and Lagrange’s Mecanique analytique. Ampere was surely on the way of becoming a great mathematician.
Just as everything began to look promising for Ampere, tragedy struck his life. His father was sent to the guillotine during the revolution causing Ampere to neglect his studies for 18 months. Ampere also was married to a wife, apparently less fond of him.
“He has no manners; he is awkward, shy and presents himself poorly.”
After a short marriage, Ampere’s wife died, and feelings of guilt flooded over him.
At this time in his life, Ampere had established himself as a tutor of mathematics and as a research mathematician. In Paris, Ampere worked on many topics, making some of his most famous discoveries. His topics of study not only included mathematics, but also metaphysics, physics, and chemistry. In mathematics, Ampere focused on partial differential equations. Ampere also made significant contributions to chemistry. In 1811, he suggested that a specific acid (anhydrous acid) was made of hydrogen and an element similar to chlorine, which he called fluorine.
Ampere also studied light, publishing an article on refraction in 1815. By 1816, he was a strong believer in the wave theory of light. In the early 1820’s, Ampere discovered a connection between electricity and magnetism after reading the results of Danish physicist Hans Christian Orsted. Ampere formulated a circuit resistance law and made other discoveries with magnetism.
By far, Andre’s most important publication on electricity and magnetism was published in 1826, called Memoir on the Mathematical Theory of Electrodynamic Phenomena, Uniquely Deduced from Experience. Ampere finished his career as a teacher of electrodynamics at the college de France.
The ampere is a form of electrical current named after him.
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 Jor from United States contributed:
ampere made the dicovery of electicyity & magnets
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 | This is a picture of Andre Mar... more
Copyright © Jack Lynch. Permission obtained on August 7th 2000, by Email message. |
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