Ludwig Boltzmann
Ludwig Boltzmann
(
February 20,
1844 -
September 5,
1906) was an
Austrian physicist famous for the invention of
statistical mechanics.
Boltzmann was born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary (now Austria).
- Biography here
Boltzmann committed suicide in 1906 by hanging while on holiday in Duino near
Trieste in
Italy. The motivation behind the suicide remains unclear, but it may have been related to his lingering resentment over establishment science's rejection of his theories. Today, his formula for
entropy S is famous:
where
kB = 1.380,658(12) × 10
-23 J K
-1 is the
Boltzmann constant and
P is the number of possible microscopic states which give the same thermodynamical state that a system may be in. Indeed this formula, as he published it in the nomenclature of his day,
is engraved on Boltzmann's
tombstone.
External link