Ludwig Boltzmann – Namesake and Inspiration

Ludwig Boltzmann was born on February 20, 1844, in the Viennese suburb of Landstraße and baptized as Ludwig Eduard the following day. Boltzmann later said that this date – the night of Carnival Tuesday to Ash Wednesday – was the reason his mood could swing so dramatically from exuberant joy to deep sadness. It was said that Boltzmann could treat people with biting irony, yet he was described as a person with a kind nature.

Ludwig's father died when he was only 15 years old, and his, until then, happy childhood changed abruptly, especially when his brother passed away shortly afterward. His mother sacrificed her entire family fortune, which she had brought as a dowry into her marriage, for his educational and university studies. In Linz, before entering the gymnasium in 1854, Boltzmann was privately tutored.

In the gymnasium, Boltzmann was taught by the best teachers and was almost always the best in his class. His interest in mathematics began early, and he graduated with honors in Linz in July 1863.

After his father's death, Karl von Lanser, a privateer from Salzburg, was appointed his guardian. As was customary in bourgeois circles at the time, Boltzmann also received piano lessons – even from Anton Bruckner, whom he highly esteemed. Piano playing accompanied him throughout his life, and he excelled at it, bringing joy to many gatherings with his favorite composer, Beethoven.

Ludwig Boltzmann In 1876, he married Henriette von Aigentler (1854-1938), with whom he had five children. He spent his happiest personal and most fruitful scientific period with her and his children in Graz, although one of his sons died prematurely.

Tragically, his last years were marred by illness, which eventually led to his suicide. Boltzmann hanged himself in a spa hotel in Duino, which was still part of Austria, during a summer stay with his family.

On his tombstone in the honorary section of the Vienna Central Cemetery (Group 14 C, Number 1), Max Planck had the fundamental relationship discovered by Boltzmann engraved:

S = k log W

The time in which Boltzmann grew up and worked was not only the time after the Revolution of 1848, the Ringstraße era, and the Gründerzeit – it was a general period of upheaval and new values. This was also true for the natural sciences, where the classical Newtonian worldview had become obsolete and the post-classical modern worldview of the natural sciences prevailed. It was a time of conflicts between idealism and materialism, between supposedly inviolable laws of social and cosmic order and those ideas of progress that are still associated with the term "Darwinism" today.

Catalogue for Ludwig Boltzmann 1844-1906 available at Hotel Boltzmann. An exhibition by the Austrian Central Library for Physics.