André-Marie Ampère
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.030878
It’s the birthday of André-Marie Ampère, who was born in 1775 in Lyon, France. Ampère studied and taught mathematics in Lyon and then in Paris. Inspired by Hans Christian Ørsted’s discovery that an electric current deflects a compass needle, Ampère conducted and interpreted his own electromagnetic experiments, which culminated in his 1826 derivation of what we now call Ampère’s law. Surprisingly, Ampère was the originator of the term “cybernetics,” which he derived from the Greek word for navigator and which he defined as the art of governing. Norbert Wiener adopted the word in 1948 to mean the scientific study of control and communication in animals and machine.
Date in History: 20 January 1775
