Jean-Baptiste Biot was a French mathematician who worked in electricity, elasticity, astronomy, heat and geometry. Biot made many contributions to the scientific community in his lifetime – most notably in astronomy, optics, and magnetism. The Biot-Savart law in magnetism was named after him and his colleague Felix Savart in 1820.
Biot collaborated with Humboldt to further work on magnetism where he derived the laws governing inclination using a small magnet at the center of the earth placed perpendicular to the magnetic equator. He also made contributions to determine the velocity of sound.
Jean-Baptiste Biot was born in Paris, France on April 12, 1774. He first served in the artillery before he was appointed as a mathematics professor at Beauvais in 1797.
Around the 1800s, he became a physics professor in College de France at age 26, and became a member of the Academy of Sciences three years later.
Studies and experiments
Jean-Baptiste Biot’s career began when he was sent by Napoleon Bonaparte’s Interior Minister to investigate the circumstances surrounding a meteor that exploded above the city of L’Aigle and scattered 3,000 pieces of stone around the countryside. He later became a member of the Legion of Honor in 1803 and became famous all over Europe after his report on the fall of the meteorite, where he demonstrated by logical deductions that the stones were debris from outer space.
A year later, Jean-Baptiste Biot took a perilous ascension on board the first scientific hot-air balloon ride with Gay-Lussac, a French chemist and Physicist, in order to determine the inclination of the Earth’s magnetic field and study the properties of the atmosphere. During this year, Biot also carried out an experimental investigation of the conductivity of metal bars.
Biot turned his attention to the study of optics and polarization of light in 1812. His rotary and chromatic polarization has led to many breakthroughs such as LCDs (liquid-crystal crystal displays) used in computer screens and televisions and polarizing filters used in photography.
He derived a general formula for the expansion of liquid in 1813 and two years later he made a critical examination of Newton’s law of cooling.
In 1814, he was elected chevalier and commander in 1849. In 1816, Jean-Baptiste Biot was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He received the Rumford Medal from the Royal Society in the field of thermal or optic properties of matter, in 1840. Rumford Medal is awarded to scientists in Europe with outstandingly important recent discovery.
Interesting fact about his life
Jean-Baptiste Biot married Gabrielle, the daughter of Antoine Francois Brisson. Gabrielle was a competent linguist. He taught her mathematics and physics so that she may translate Ernst Gottfried Fischer’s physics textbook from German to French.
Jean-Baptiste Biot became very skeptical about his belief in a personal God, but when he was in Rome in 1825, he sought and obtained an audience with Pope Leo XII. He made a formal return to the Roman Catholic Church in 1846.
Throughout his life as a man of science, Jean-Baptiste Biot was a prolific writer and made many contributions to literature, and one of his most popular works was Analyse de la mécanique céleste de M. Laplace.
Jean-Baptiste Biot died on 3 February, 1862. Rue Biot is a Paris street named after him.
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