Andre-Marie Ampere
A statue of André-Marie Ampère made by Charles Textor portraying Ampère on his bronze armchair with a stone pedestal engraved with lions and a few of his many titles of glory. It was inaugurated by French President of the Republic Sadi Carnot on 8 September 1888.
Ampere was a French physicist and mathematician who was one of the founders of the science of classical electromagnetism, which he referred to as “electrodynamics”. He is also the inventor of numerous applications, such as the solenoid (a term coined by him) and the electrical telegraph.
The French Revolution was influential in his life as when the Jacobin faction seized control of the Revolutionary government in 1792, his father Jean-Jacques Ampère resisted the new political tides, and was guillotined in 1793.
Ampère began developing a mathematical and physical theory to understand the relationship between electricity and magnetism which laid the foundation of electrodynamics. Ampère’s law states that the mutual action of two lengths of current-carrying wire is proportional to their lengths and to the intensities of their currents.
As an autodidact, Ampère was a member of the French Academy of Sciences and professor at the École polytechnique and the Collège de France. The SI unit of measurement of electric current, the ampere, is named after him. His name is also one of the 72 names inscribed on the Eiffel Tower.
