Boltzmann, Ludwig (1844-1906)

Ludwig Boltzmann is best known for his appication of statistical methods to physics and for his work on the kinetic theory of gases. Boltzmann, an Austrian theoretical physicist, wrote his first paper on the kinetic theory of gases in 1859 whilst still a student in Vienna and later in 1868 went on to use new statistical methods introduced by James Clerk Maxwell to derive the velocity distribution of colliding gas molecules (the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution). He moved to the University of Graz where, in 1877, he published the famous equation that describes the relationship between thermodynamic entropy and the statistical distribution of molecular configurations In 1884, Boltzmann went on to use the second law of thermodynamics to derive the law relating the total amount of energy radiated by a black body and its temperature which had been discovered experimentally by Josef Stefan. In consequence, it is now sometimes known as the Stefan-Boltzmann law. From 1900 Boltzmann suffered from depression, partly due to the hostile reviews of his work by influential colleagues such as Ernst Mach and Wilhelm Ostwald. He killed himself in 1906, only a few years before most of the scientific community accepted his kinetic and statistical theories, which are now cornerstones of physics. His gravestone is carved with a version of his famous equation