Andre Marie Ampere (1775-1836), after a contemporary portrait in oils. A gifted physicist and mathematician, his first professorship came in 1805, followed by another at Paris in 1809. It was Ampere that proposed the right hand screw rule of the magnetic deflection around a current- carrying wire. He also showed in a classical experiment that two parallel wires carrying currents attract if the currents are in the same direction. In his theories of electrodynamics, he showed that the deflection of a compass needle by a nearby current was proportional to that current, a discovery that led to the unit of current being named after him.