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in tears for no apparent reason in the middle of class. This did not take away from his compulsion for study and discovery. Miserable and depressed, he continued his work at the academy in Paris. From there, he influenced all types of contemporary mathematics, physics, and chemistry. The story goes that he even named the element Fluorine in 1811, seventy- five years before it was isolated in a lab. This notoriety got him elected to the Institut National des Sciences in 1814, developing theories on molecule theory.
With renewed enthusiasm, he started tutoring mathematics privately while working on his own studies. In 1799, he married Julie and soon fathered his only child, Jean-Jacques Ampère, his father’s namesake. Throughout his early years as a teenager, he submitted papers to journals and academies, trying to be published. All of them were rejected, often without a return letter. This may have deterred a lesser man, but he was able to publish ‘The Mathematical Theory of Games’ in 1802. It covered new thoughts on probability and gambling, finally catching the attention of someone at the École Polytechnique in Paris and gaining him a position as a professor of mathematics in 1803. This elation soon turned to grief when, in July of the same year, his wife Julie died from tuberculosis, less than ten years after his father’s execution. He would carry this grief with him, and it would characterize him for the remainder of his life. While utterly brilliant, he could only work in short sprints followed by ever-lengthening periods of deep apathy and emptiness. He suffered from crippling anxiety and would fall into long bouts of existential dread regularly. There are stories from students of him breaking down
Middle years (1793 – 1820) Young Ampère was eighteen when this tragedy struck him, and the shock caused his excitement for knowledge to leave him. His fantastic mind was a wreck. Hollow and critically depressed, he mourned his father’s death for over a year. This was until he found Rousseau’s ‘Letters on the Elements of Botany.’ With this, he found a new fascination with flowers, then poetry, and soon he met his future wife, Julie Carron. ‘Her blue eyes wear the serenity of an angelic soul; a smile animates every feature; all her movements are marked by grace; candor gleams on her brow, and colors her cheeks with a light tint of rose.’
-Young Ampère describing Julie Carron, 1796
A Middle Aged Ampère
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