Assignment:

Andre Marie Ampère

Submitted to :
Sir Muzafar Bashir

Submitted by:
Sheraz Hussain

Roll No:
226422 ( 324 )

Class :
BS Physics (Morning)

4th semester

Session :
2017-2021

Govt. Postgraduate college Jhang

  Introduction
Andre Marie Ampère was the first person
to study electrodynamics and discover
electromagnetism. He is credited for the
invention of a vital component of the
modern astatic galvanometer, the astatic
needle. He was the first to determine how
was generated when two parallel wires are
charged with electricity.

Ampere was a voracious reader and mostly

self-taught. His passion for science brought
him the greatest of honours and accolades
that very few people ever achieved. He is better known for his
accurate calculations in measuring the flow of current. Later
on, to honour his contributions, the term ampere was given to
a single unit of electric current. He was, without a doubt, a
gifted intellectual who researched in a variety of disciplines.
He excelled in chemistry and successfully came up with the
classification of elements. He did excellent work on the theory
of refraction of light as well. On the whole, he spent his whole
life in conducting experiments, researching and studying
mathematics, physics, chemistry, and philosophy of these
sciences. Let us go back to the beginning, to the day he was
born and trace his life’s achievements, the travails and the
times.
In the beautiful city of Lyon in France, a young couple, Jeanne
Antoinette Sarcey de Sutieres and Jean-Jacques Ampere
joyously welcomed the birth of their bonny baby boy, Andre-
Marie Ampere on the 20 th January, 1775. Jean Jacques Ampere
was a prosperous silk merchant and owned a country house in
Poleymieux au Mont D’Or, just 10 kilometres from their
primary home at Lyon. Apart from the silk business, he had
also studied law and owned a huge library of books
comprising the works of Rousseau, Denis Diderot, Jean le
RondD’Alambert and many more. Not much is known about his
mother except that she was a devout Christian and hence he

too was brought up in the catholic faith. The family would

spend most time of the year in Lyon except for summer when
they would retire to their country house in Poleymieux.
At an early age, Ampere proved himself to be a prodigy in
maths, when he would devise unique ways to learn numbers
using pebbles and breadcrumbs.

Initially, he did attend a primary School at Lyon, though there

is not much information as regards to the duration of his
attendance.

His father, Jean-Jacques, was an ardent admirer of Rousseau,

whose thoughts on education were outlined in his work Émile,
and became the basis of Ampère’s education. Rousseau had
argued that children should avoid formal education and
instead, pursue “direct education from nature.” Jean-Jacques
put this into practice by allowing his son to educate himself
within the walls of his well-stocked library. Enlightening
masterpieces by masters such as Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte
de Buffon’s Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière (begun
in 1749) and Denis Diderot, and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert’s
Encyclopédie (volumes added between 1751 and 1772) thus
became Ampère’s schoolmasters. As he grew up, his father
decides to permanently reside in Poleymieux so that Ampere
receives the desired knowledge from the beauty of nature.

 Education
Ampere never attended any secondary School and the lush
natural surroundings of his country home in Poleymieux,
inspired in him the desire to gain more knowledge. It was an
ideal location for his intellectual pursuits as he would
endlessly walk around the woods, marvelling at its greenery,
and memorizing poetries. He was so mesmerized by the
beauty of nature, that he would disguise himself in a romantic
image, and believed nature to be a mirror of our emotional
self. Ampere, much later, describes the adolescence years,
spent in the lap of nature, as the best time of his life.

Apart from nature, easy access to his father’s huge library,

proved instrumental in gaining intellectual expertise
pertaining to science, mathematics, philosophy and literature.
Ampere read widely on books written by known authors of
those times- Jean Racine, Francois Marie Arouet, also known
as the famous Voltaire and the classical poetries of Virgil. He
also showed keen interest in history and politics, especially
the ongoing war of American Independence where the French
Government provided military support to the American
soldiers. The political conflict then, had a huge impact on
Ampere’s life later on, and explained his controversial
sentiments towards the French Revolution.

Beside classical poetry and literature, he developed keen

interest in science at the age of 13. While exploring his
father’s vast library, Ampere stumbled upon ‘Abrege des
elements de mathematiques’ written by Dominique-Francois
Rivard and Elements d’arithmetique, d’algebre et de
geometric by Jean-Mathurin Mazeas. Now aged 12 and with
no formal educational background, Ampere completed his
academic pursuits in arithmetic, algebra and geometry
without following any chronological pattern. He completely
grasped all books and papers on conic branch of mathematics,
and was impressed with the works of Jean-Baptiste de
LaChapelle’s Traitesur les sections coniques and Gillaume de L’
Hopital’sTraiteanalytique des sections coniques. After
elaborate research and study, he decided to develop a new
division in conics. In mathematics, a conic is a curve obtained
as the intersection of a cone with a plane.

Our young math genius then wrote his first mathematical

paper, titled ‘Sur la rectification d’un arc quelconque de cercle
plus petit que la demi-circonference’, at a tender age of 13.

How incredible! His work primarily laid emphasis on the

complex problem of constructing a line of the same length as
that of an arc of a circle. He confidently submitted his papers
to the Academie de Lyon, but was disappointed as the paper
was not published. The reason cited by the Academie was the
use of infinitesimals (part of mathematics associated with
finding tangent lines to curves), and not differential calculus,
which made Ampere’s paper worthless. However the
Academie was stunned by young Ampere’s brilliance in
mathematics and encouraged him to continue with his
research further.
  FRENCH REVOLUTION
In addition, Ampère used his access to the latest books to
begin teaching himself advanced mathematics at age 12. In
later life Ampère claimed that he knew as much about
mathematics and science when he was eighteen as ever he
knew; but, a polymath , his reading embraced history, travels,
poetry, philosophy, and the natural sciences. [4] His mother was
a devout woman, so Ampère was also initiated into
the Catholic faith along with Enlightenment science.
The French Revolution (1789–99) that began during his youth
was also influential: Ampère's father was called into public
service by the new revolutionary government, [5] becoming a
justice of the peace in a small town near Lyon. When
the Jacobin faction seized control of the Revolutionary
government in 1792, his father Jean-Jacques Ampère resisted
the new political tides, and he was guillotined on 24
November 1793, as part of the Jacobin purges of the period.

In 1796 Ampère met Julie Carron, and in 1799 they were

married. André-Marie Ampère took his first regular job in
1799 as a mathematics teacher, which gave him the financial
security to marry Carron and father his first child, Jean-
Jacques (named after his father), the next year. (Jean-Jacques
Ampère eventually achieved his own fame as a scholar of
languages). Ampère's maturation corresponded with the
transition to the Napoleonic regime in France, and the young
father and teacher found new opportunities for success within
the technocratic structures favoured by the new French First
Consul . In 1802 Ampère was appointed a professor
of physics and chemistry at the École Centrale in Bourg-en-
Bresse , leaving his ailing wife and infant son Jean-Jacques
Antoine Ampère in Lyon. He used his time in Bourg to research
mathematics, producing Considérations sur la théorie
mathématique de jeu (1802; "Considerations on the
Mathematical Theory of Games"), a treatise on mathematical
probability that he sent to the Paris Academy of Sciences in
1803.

 Teaching Career
After the death of his wife in July 1803, Ampère moved
to Paris , where he began a tutoring post at the new École
Polytechnique in 1804. Despite his lack of formal
qualifications, Ampère was appointed a professor of
mathematics at the school in 1809. As well as holding
positions at this school until 1828, in 1819 and 1820 Ampère
offered courses in philosophy and astronomy , respectively, at
the University of Paris , and in 1824 he was elected to the
prestigious chair in experimental physics at the Collège de
France . In 1814 Ampère was invited to join the class of
mathematicians in the new Institut Impérial, the umbrella
under which the reformed state Academy of Sciences would
sit.

Ampère engaged in a diverse array of scientific inquiries

during the years leading up to his election to the academy—
writing papers and engaging in topics from mathematics and
philosophy to chemistry and astronomy, which was customary
among the leading scientific intellectuals of the day. Ampère
claimed that "at eighteen years he found three culminating
points in his life, his First Communion , the reading of Antoine
Leonard Thomas's "Eulogy of Descartes", and the Taking of the
Bastille . On the day of his wife's death he wrote two verses
from the Psalms , and the prayer, 'O Lord, God of Mercy, unite
me in Heaven with those whom you have permitted me to
love on earth.' In times of duress he would take refuge in the
reading of the Bible and the Fathers of the Church .

For a time he took into his family the young student Frédéric
Ozanam (1813–1853), one of the founders of the Conference
of Charity , later known as the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul .
Through Ampère, Ozanam had contact with leaders of the
neo-Catholic movement, such as François-René de
Chateaubriand , Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire , and Charles
Forbes René de Montalembert . Ozanam was beatified by Pope
John Paul II in 1998.

Work in Electromagnetism

In September 1820, Ampère's friend and eventual

eulogist François Arago showed the members of the French
Academy of Sciences the surprising discovery
of Danish physicist Hans Christian Ørsted that a magnetic
needle is deflected by an adjacent electric current . Ampère
began developing a mathematical and physical theory to
understand the relationships between electricity and
magnetism
 Furthering Ørsted's experimental work, Ampère showed that
two parallel wires carrying electric currents attract or repel
each other, depending on whether the currents flow in the
same or opposite directions, respectively - this laid the
foundation of electrodynamics. He also applied mathematics
in generalizing physical laws from these experimental results.
The most important of these was the principle that came to
be called Ampère's law , which states that the mutual action of
two lengths of current-carrying wire is proportional to their
lengths and to the intensities of their currents. Ampère also
applied this same principle to magnetism, showing the
harmony between his law and French physicist Charles
Augustin de Coulomb 's law of magnetic action. Ampère's
devotion to, and skill with, experimental techniques anchored
his science within the emerging fields of experimental physics.

Ampère also provided a physical understanding of the

electromagnetic relationship, theorizing the existence of an
"electrodynamic molecule" (the forerunner of the idea of
the electron ) that served as the component element of both
electricity and magnetism. Using this physical explanation of
electromagnetic motion, Ampère developed a physical
account of electromagnetic phenomena that was both
empirically demonstrable and mathematically predictive. In
1827 Ampère published his magnum opus, Mémoire sur la
théorie mathématique des phénomènes électrodynamiques
uniquement déduite de l’experience (Memoir on the
Mathematical Theory of Electrodynamic Phenomena, Uniquely
Deduced from Experience), the work that coined the name of
his new science, electrodynamics, and became known ever
after as its founding treatise.

In 1827 Ampère was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal

Society and in 1828, a foreign member of the Royal Swedish
Academy of Science . [7]

HOUNORS

. 8.10.1825: Member of the Royal Academy of Science, Letters

and Fine Arts of Belgium .
. When
Gustave Eiffel
built his
famous Eiffel
Tower in Pairs
in 1889, he
included the
names of 72
prominent French scientists on plaques around the first
section at the base of the structure. The name of André-
Marie Ampère is included in that distinguished memorial.

 LEGACY
In recognition of his contribution to the creation of modern electrical
science, an international convention, signed at the 1881 International
Exposition of Electricity, established the ampere as a standard unit of
electrical measurement, along with the coulomb, volt, ohm, and
watt, which are named, respectively, after Ampère's contemporaries
Charles-Augustin The Coulomb of France, Alessandro Volta of Italy,
Georg Ohm of Germany, and James Watt of Scotland. Ampère's name
is one of the 72 names inscribed on the Eiffel Tower.
Several items are named after Ampère; many streets and squares,
schools, a Lyon metro station, and an electric ferry in Norway.

 Books
These following books are of Andre Marie Ampere.

 REFRENCES.
 WWW.WIKIPEDIA.COM
 WWW.SIMPLYKNOWLEDGE.COM
 WWW.BRITANNICA.COM
 WWW.FAMOUSSCIENTISTS.COM
 WWW.HISTORY.ST