Interior of Institut de France, Paris 6th 013

Félix Savart (; ; 30 June 1791, Mézières – 16 March 1841, Paris) was a French

physicist A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe. Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate cau ...

and

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change. History On ...

who is primarily known for the Biot–Savart law of electromagnetism, which he discovered together with his colleague Jean-Baptiste Biot. His main interest was in

acoustics Acoustics is a branch of physics that deals with the study of mechanical waves in gases, liquids, and solids including topics such as vibration, sound, ultrasound and infrasound. A scientist who works in the field of acoustics is an acousticia ...

and the study of vibrating bodies. A particular interest in the

violin The violin, sometimes known as a '' fiddle'', is a wooden chordophone ( string instrument) in the violin family. Most violins have a hollow wooden body. It is the smallest and thus highest-pitched instrument ( soprano) in the family in regu ...

led him to create an experimental

trapezoidal A quadrilateral with at least one pair of parallel sides is called a trapezoid () in American and Canadian English. In British and other forms of English, it is called a trapezium (). A trapezoid is necessarily a convex quadrilateral in Eucli ...

model. He gave his name to the savart, a unit of measurement for musical intervals, and to

Savart's wheel The Savart wheel is an acoustical device named after the French physicist Félix Savart (1791–1841), which was originally conceived and developed by the English scientist Robert Hooke (1635–1703). A card held to the edge of a spinning toot ...

—a device he used while investigating the range of human hearing.

Biography

Savart was the son of Gérard Savart, an engineer at the military school of Metz. His brother, Nicolas, who was a student at the

École Polytechnique École may refer to: * an elementary school in the French educational stages normally followed by secondary education establishments (collège and lycée) * École (river), a tributary of the Seine flowing in région Île-de-France * École, Savoi ...

and an officer in the engineering corps, did work on vibration. At the military hospital at Metz, Savart studied medicine and later went on to the

University of Strasbourg The University of Strasbourg (french: Université de Strasbourg, Unistra) is a public research university located in Strasbourg, Alsace, France, with over 52,000 students and 3,300 researchers. The French university traces its history to the ea ...

, where he received his medical degree in 1816. Savart became a professor at

Collège de France The Collège de France (), formerly known as the ''Collège Royal'' or as the ''Collège impérial'' founded in 1530 by François I, is a higher education and research establishment ('' grand établissement'') in France. It is located in Paris n ...

in 1820 and was the co-originator of the Biot–Savart law, along with Jean-Baptiste Biot. Together, they worked on the theory of

magnetism Magnetism is the class of physical attributes that are mediated by a magnetic field, which refers to the capacity to induce attractive and repulsive phenomena in other entities. Electric currents and the magnetic moments of elementary particles ...

and

electrical current Electricity is the set of physical phenomena associated with the presence and motion of matter that has a property of electric charge. Electricity is related to magnetism, both being part of the phenomenon of electromagnetism, as described b ...

s. Their law was developed and published in 1820.A joint Biot-Savart paper "Note sur le magnétisme de la pile de Volta" was published in the ''Annales de chemie et de physique'' in 1820. The Biot–Savart law relates magnetic fields to the currents which are their sources. Savart also studied

. He developed the Savart wheel which produces sound at specific graduated frequencies using rotating discs. Félix Savart is the namesake of a unit of measurement for musical intervals, the savart, though it was actually invented by Joseph Sauveur ( Stigler's law of eponymy).

Works

References

External links

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Logarithmic Interval Measures
{{DEFAULTSORT:Savart, Felix French physicists 1791 births 1841 deaths Foreign Members of the Royal Society Members of the French Academy of Sciences Music psychologists People from Charleville-Mézières

Biography

Works

See also

References

External links