Ampere was born in 1775 in Lyon. As was Babbage, his family was very weathy and Ampere did not go to school, yet he received a full education at home. At the age of 13, Ampere started reading mathematics books and in the same year, he sent a paper to the Academie de Lyon, though it was not worthy at all. Only by this, did Ampere realised that he should study more about mathematics and he moved on to read the works of Euler, Lagrange and Bernoulli.

The French revolution was a mark for Ampere's tragedy life. His sister and then his father died and he was desperated. After the marriage with Julie in 1799, which lasted for five years till she left, he moved to Bourg and became a professor of physic and chemistry there. Few years later, he published his first rigorous works on probability and then analytical geometry.

In 1804, Ampere was appointed lecturer at the École Polytechnique and he started his second marriage two years later. Though he was devastated by the disastrous marriage, which ended with seperation, Ampere soon became professor of mathematics at Polytechnique and held it for nearly 20 years.

During his life, Ampere was not only interested in mathematics, but also physics, metaphysics and chemistry. One of his remarkable mathematics paper was on partial differential equations and for this he was elected to the Institut National des Sciences in 1814. He was the chaiman of Université de France until his death in 1836.