One of the Earliest Analytical Papers on Electromagnetism: Biot's 1801 paper "On a Problem in Physics" Translated

 In 1798, Pierre-Simon de Laplace (of the newly formed École Polytechnique in Paris) published the first two volumes of his landmark treatise, Mécanique Céleste. Three years later, Jean-Baptiste Biot (of the famous Biot-Savart law) published one of the earliest analytical papers applying mathematics from Laplace's treatise to the recent results demonstrated by Coulomb, that electric force changes with the inverse squared law in the same manner as gravity. 

The paper, titled Sur un probléme de physique, relatif à l'électricité, was published in the Bulletin de la Société Philomathique, Tome 3 (1801), pp. 21 - 23. It was a tough paper to track down, and little mention is made of it anywhere online, but for one source, an article by R. W. Home in the BJHS, 1983, vol 16, titled Poisson's memoirs on electricity: academic politics and a new style physics. Biot's paper is significant not only for being an early example of analytical electromagnetism, but also because it served as the direct inspiration for Siméon Dénis Poisson's landmark works, his memoires on the distribution of electricity on the surface of conducting bodies (1812). 

And so, for its historical significance, I translated the paper, and here it is, one of the few translations, or mentions, of this fascinating article. 


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