Famous Scientist Ludwig Boltzmann

Ludwig Boltzmann

Ludwig Eduard Boltzmann (February 20, 1844 – September 5, 1906) was an Austrian physicist whose greatest achievement was in the development of statistical mechanics, which explains and predicts how the properties of atoms (such as mass, charge, and structure) determine the visible properties of matter (such as viscosity, thermal conductivity, and diffusion).


Boltzmann was born in Vienna, the capital of the Austrian Empire. His father, Ludwig Georg Boltzmann, was a tax official. His grandfather, who had moved to Vienna from Berlin, was a clock manufacturer, and Boltzmann’s mother, Katharina Pauernfeind, was originally from Salzburg. He received his primary education from a private tutor at the home of his parents. Boltzmann attended high school in Linz, Upper Austria. At age 15, Boltzmann lost his father.


In 1869 at age 25, thanks to a letter of recommendation written by Stefan, he was appointed full Professor of Mathematical Physics at the University of Graz in the province of Styria. In 1869 he spent several months in Heidelberg working with Robert Bunsen and Leo Königsberger and then in 1871 he was with Gustav Kirchhoff and Hermann von Helmholtz in Berlin. In 1873 Boltzmann joined the University of Vienna as Professor of Mathematics and there he stayed until 1876.

Boltzmann spent a great deal of effort in his final years defending his theories. He did not get along with some of his colleagues in Vienna, particularly Ernst Mach, who became a professor of philosophy and history of sciences in 1895. That same year Georg Helm and Wilhelm Ostwald presented their position on Energetics, at a meeting in Lübeck in 1895. They saw energy, and not matter, as the chief component of the universe. However, Boltzmann's position carried the day among other physicists who supported his atomic theories in the debate. Thereafter in 1900, Boltzmann went to the University of Leipzig, on the invitation of Wilhelm Ostwald. After the retirement of Mach due to bad health, Boltzmann came back to Vienna in 1902. In 1903 he founded the Austrian Mathematical Society together with Gustav von Escherich and Emil Müller. His students included Karl Przibram, Paul Ehrenfest and Lise Meitner.


Boltzmann's most important scientific contributions were in kinetic theory, including the Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution for molecular speeds in a gas. In addition, Maxwell–Boltzmann statistics and the Boltzmann distribution over energies remain the foundations of classical statistical mechanics. They are applicable to the many phenomena that do not require quantum statistics and provide a remarkable insight into the meaning of temperature.