André-Marie Ampère

André-Marie Ampère FRS (20 January 1775 – 10 June 1836) was a French physicist and mathematician who is generally regarded as one of the main discoverers of electromagnetism. The SI unit of measurement of electric current, the ampere, is named after him.

Quotes

 * Écoute les savants, mais ne les écoute que d'une oreille!... Que l'autre soit toujours prête à recevoir les doux accents de la voix de ton ami céleste!
 * Listen to learned men, but do so only with one ear !... Let the other be always ready to receive the sweet accents of the voice of your heavenly Friend!
 * Ampère's Meditation, September 1805


 * Either one or the other [ analysis or synthesis ] may be direct or indirect. The direct procedure is when the point of departure is known-direct synthesis in the elements of geometry. By combining at random simple truths with each other, more complicated ones are deduced from them. This is the method of discovery, the special method of inventions, contrary to popular opinion.
 * André-Marie Ampè, in André-Marie Ampère: Enlightenment and Electrodynamics, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 159


 * There is synthesis when, in combining therein judgments that are made known to us from simpler relations, one deduces judgments from them relative to more complicated relations. There is analysis when from a complicated truth one deduces more simple truths.
 * André-Marie Ampère in: André-Marie Ampère: Enlightenment and Electrodynamics, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 158.

Quotes about Ampère
The whole, theory and experiment, seems as if it had leaped, full grown and full armed, from the brain of the 'Newton of electricity.' It is perfect in form, and unassailable in accuracy, and it is summed up in a formula from which all the phenomena may be deduced, and which must always remain the cardinal formula of electro-dynamics.
 * The experimental investigation by which Ampère established the law of the mechanical action between electric currents is one of the most brilliant achievements in science.
 * James Clerk Maxwell, A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism (1873) quoted from 3rd edition (1892) Vol. 2, Ch. 3, p. 175.