Ludwig Eduard Boltzmann

(He described a general law of the dynamics of an ideal gas) Ludwig Eduard Boltzmann was an Austrian physicist famous for his founding contributions in the fields of statistical mechanics and statistical thermodynamics. He was born in 20 February 1844 in Vienna, Austria. He obtained his PhD in 1867 from the University of Vienna. From 1869 he held professorships in mathematics and physics at the universities of Graz, Vienna, and Munich and Leipzig in Germany. In 1868 he extended James Clerk Maxwells theory of the velocity distribution for colliding gas molecules to derive the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution, which states that the average energy of motion of a molecule is the same for each direction. He was one of the first to recognise the importance of Maxwells electromagnetic theory. In 1877 Boltzmann used statistical ideas to gain valuable insight into the meaning of entropy. He realized that entropy could be thought of as a measure of disorder, and that the second law of thermodynamics expressed the fact that disorder tends to increase. In 1887, he presented the famous Boltzmann equation to describe the dynamics of an ideal gas. It showed how increasing entropy corresponded to increasing molecular randomness. The equation formulated by Boltzmann led to better understanding of diffusion, viscosity and heat conduction. It also explained Hall effect (the formation of the electric field by the joint action of the outer magnetic field and the current flowing in the conductor). Boltzmann died on 5 September1906 in Duino, Austria (now Italy).