André-Marie Ampère

About André-Marie Ampère

André-Marie Ampère (1775–1836) stands as a foundational figure in physics, whose legacy is cemented by the SI unit of electric current, the ampere, named in his honor. His critical contribution was establishing the fundamental relationship between electricity and magnetism, effectively creating the science of electrodynamics. Through rigorous mathematical and experimental work, Ampère demonstrated that an electric current flowing through a wire generates a magnetic field and that two parallel currents exert a force on each other. This work, performed in the early 19th century, laid the essential groundwork for all subsequent research in electromagnetism, justifying his placement at #492 on MIT's Historical Popularity Index.

Despite this high historical standing, Ampère experiences a significant modern attention gap, earning an index of -3x relative to his importance. His 120K annualized Wikipedia views in 2025 fall far short of what his foundational role might suggest. For comparison, he receives substantially less attention than his modern field counterpart, Erwin Schrödinger (\#500 importance, 554K views), or even historical figures of lesser impact like Florence Nightingale (\#650 importance, 1.5M views). While his view count is declining year-over-year by -6.6%, his short-term momentum shows a recent uptick of +13% in Q1 versus Q3 views, suggesting a mild, though insufficient, resurgence of interest.