ABSTRACT
Andr'e-Marie Amp'ere was born in Lyon on 20 January 1775. His reading was wide in scope. He read various French Enlightenment authors, including Georges-Louis Leclerc and Compte de Buffon, who were primarily naturalists but also mathematicians and cosmologists. He 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. In 1814 he was invited to join the newly formed Institute Imperial, the umbrella under which the reformed state Academy of Sciences would sit. Gonod helped him to compile the first volume of Essai sur la Philsophie des Sciences which reflects on his experiences as a scientist and suggests a classification of academic disciplines. Later Ampere wrote a second volume. That was compiled by his son, and published posthumously in 1843. Unfortunately, Ampere’s classification has not been regarded as useful by the community so that his efforts in that direction were wasted.
