Ampère, André-Marie - Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. I, p. 682

Machine translation of the 1948–1954 Italian original. The original text is authoritative.

AMPÈRE, ANDRÉ-MARIE. — French physicist, mathematician, and philosopher, b. at Poleymieux near Lyon on 22 January 1775, d. at Marseille on 11 June 1836. He was the greatest physicist in France in the 19th century. His discovery of the laws of electricity and magnetism must be placed alongside the discoveries of Newton and Volta. He was also a great mathematician and an acute philosopher. Edu-

cated by his father, he read D’Alembert and Diderot’s Encyclopedia with enthusiasm and through it learned to love science and the search for truth. From his father he learned not to care about titles and diplomas. Dissatisfied and eager to learn every new idea, he wrote to a friend: «... I find nothing but truths; teach me the truth». He had a most unhappy life; his father, a Girondin, was guillotined at Lyon on 21 November 1793, leaving his son a testament that demonstrates the elevation and nobility of his spirit. His deeply religious mother transmitted her pure and sincere faith to her son. In A.’s work, science must not be separated from religion, which simultaneously occupied his mind, as revealed to us in his correspondence and in the memoirs of his contemporaries.

C. A. Valson published in 1910 one of his unpublished memoirs, Sur les preuves historiques de la divinité du Christianisme. His philosophical ideas, and in particular a dichotomous classification of all human knowledge, are contained in the two volumes Essai sur la philosophie des sciences, Paris 1834, 1838 and 1843, published by his son Jean Jacques.

BIBL.: The writings on electricity are contained in Mémoires sur l'Electrodynamique, Paris 1885–87, published by the Société Française de Physique. His mathematical works, scattered in rare collections, also deserve to be republished. The Société des Amis d'A.-M. A. published Correspondance du grand A., 2 vols., Paris 1936, and a supplementary volume,

1943. The second volume contains a complete bibliography of his works and unpublished manuscripts

B. Saint Hilaire, Philosophie des deux A., Paris 1866, 2nd ed., there 1870. — Mme Chevreux, Journal et correspondance de A.-M. A., Paris 1872; by the same author, the two extremely rare volumes: A.-M. A. et Jean-Jacques A., correspondance et souvenirs (de 1865 à 1864), Paris 1875. — Among the biographies, noteworthy are those by E. Littré and Ch.-A. Sainte-Beuve, prefaced to vol. II of the Essai sur la philosophie des sciences, cited above; C. A. Valson, La vie et les travaux d'A. M. A., 3rd ed., Lyon 1910; L. de Launay, Le grand A., d'après des documents inédits, Paris 1925; R. Sartori, A., Brescia 1946. — Cf. A. Eymieu, La part des croyants dans les progrès de la science, I, 3rd ed., Paris 1920, pp. 157–66. Giovanni Vacca