Jean-Baptiste Biot

Jean-Baptiste Biot was a French physicist, astronomer and mathematician, born in Paris on 21 April 1774 and educated at the Lycee Louis-le-Grand and the Ecole Polytechnique. He became professor of physics at the College de France around 1800 and was elected to the French Academy of Sciences three years later. In 1803 he was sent to report on the stones that had fallen at L'Aigle in Normandy, and his findings did much to establish that meteorites come from outer space. In 1804 he made one of the first scientific balloon ascents with Gay-Lussac to study how the Earth's magnetic field changes with height. With Felix Savart he gave his name to the Biot-Savart law of magnetostatics in 1820, and he also studied the polarization of light. He died in Paris in 1862.