He was born in the Landstrasse district of Vienna on the night of February 20, 1844. His father an Austrian government official, was born of a Protestant clockmaker from Berlin and his mother Catherina Pauernfeind, was Catholic.
Boltzmann received his primary education from a private tutor at home and from the Mittelschule in Linz. He stood out as a very good, industrious pupil, nearly always at the top of his class.
He entered the University of Vienna in 1863 and specialized in mathematics and physics, though he also took a number of courses in philosophy.
Josef Stefan, the acting director of physics institute, became Boltzmann main teacher in physics; in mathematics he learned most from Joseph Petzval, a highly original and stylistically elegant teacher and author.
Boltzmann published his first scientific article in 1865, received his PhD on his work of kinetic theory of gases in 1866, and his Habilitation or permission to teach in university in March 1868. In 1869, then only 25 years old, Boltzmann was appointed Ordinarius of mathematical physics at the University of Graz.
His arrival in Graz marked the start of a period of intense scientific activity culminated in 1872 in the publication, in the Proceedings of the Imperial Academy of Sciences of Vienna, of the paper with the hardly informative title of ‘Further researchers on the thermal equilibrium of gas molecules’.
In this paper that the celebrated equation called after Boltzmann was introduced.
He moved to Munich in 1891, then back to Vienna in 1894, when a Chair became vacant on the death of Stefan. In 1902, Boltzmann was appointed Professor for Theoretical Physics at the University of Vienna.
Ludwig Eduard Boltzmann (1844-1906)
