Which French physicist gives his name to the SI unit of electric charge?

The French physicist who gives his name to the SI unit of electric charge is Charles-Augustin de Coulomb.

The unit is the coulomb, symbol C, named after Coulomb’s work in electricity and magnetism. Coulomb was an eighteenth-century French physicist and engineer whose experiments on electrostatic forces led to Coulomb’s law: the force between two point charges depends on the product of their charges and decreases with the square of the distance between them.

One coulomb is the amount of charge transferred by a current of one ampere in one second. Since the 2019 SI revision, the system fixes the elementary charge exactly, so a coulomb corresponds to approximately 6.24 × 10¹⁸ elementary charges. A proton carries one positive elementary charge, while an electron carries one negative elementary charge.

The distractors are named after scientists associated with other electrical quantities. The ohm measures resistance, the volt measures potential difference, and the ampere measures electric current. Coulomb’s name belongs specifically to electric charge and electrostatic force.