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Paul Ehrenfest
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Austrian and Dutch theoretical physicist (1880–1933)
Key facts
- Born
- ( 1880-01-18 ) 18 January 1880, Vienna , Austria-Hungary
- Died
- 25 September 1933 (1933-09-25) (aged 53), Amsterdam , Netherlands
- Cause of death
- Murder-suicide
- Education
- TU Wien University of Göttingen University of Vienna ( PhD )
- Known for
- Ehrenfest model (1907) Ehrenfest paradox (1909) Work on nonradiation condition (1910) Coining the term ultraviolet catastrophe (1911) Ehrenfest theorem (1927)
- Title
- Professor of Theoretical Physics
- Term
- 1912–1933
- Predecessor
- Hendrik Lorentz
- Successor
- Hans Kramers
- Spouse
- Tatyana Afanasyeva ( married</span>"}]]}'>m. 1904 )
- Children
- 4, including Tatyana van Aardenne-Ehrenfest and Galinka Ehrenfest
- Fields
- Statistical physics
- Institutions
- Leiden University Lorentz Institute
- Thesis
- Die Bewegung starrer Körper in Flüssigkeiten und die Mechanik von Hertz (The motion of rigid bodies in fluids and the mechanics of Hertz) (1904)
- Doctoral advisor
- Ludwig Boltzmann
- Doctoral students
- Johannes Martinus Burgers (1918) Hendrik Kramers (1919) Dirk Coster (1922) Samuel Goudsmit (1927) George Uhlenbeck (1927) Jan Tinbergen (1929) Arend Joan Rutgers (1930) Hendrik Casimir (1931)
- Other notable students
- Enrico Fermi Viktor Trkal Gerhard Heinrich Dieke
via Wikipedia infobox
Wikidata facts
- Instance of
- human
- Given name
- Paul
- Gender
- male
- Citizenship
- Austria
- Place of birth
- Vienna
- Place of death
- Amsterdam
- Spouse
- Tatyana Afanasyeva
- Occupation
- mathematician
- Position held
- professor
- Educated at
- Akademisches Gymnasium
- Employer
- Leiden University
- Languages spoken
- German
- Native language
- German
- Religion
- atheism
- Academic degree
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Doctoral advisor
- Ludwig Boltzmann
- Field of work
- theoretical physics
- Image
- Paul Ehrenfest.jpg
Show 12 more facts
- student
- Gunnar Nordström
- Commons category
- Paul Ehrenfest
- date of birth
- 1880-01-18
- date of death
- 1933-09-25
- Commons gallery
- Paul Ehrenfest
- manner of death
- Suicide
- ethnic group
- Jewish people
- name in native language
- Paul Ehrenfest
- cause of death
- gunshot wound
- writing language
- German
- maintained by WikiProject
- WikiProject Mathematics
Sources (2)
via Wikidata · CC0
~13 min read
Encyclopedic overview
Paul Ehrenfest ( Austrian German: [ˈpaʊl ˈeːrənfɛst]; 18 January 1880 – 25 September 1933) was an Austrian theoretical physicist who made major contributions to statistical mechanics and its relation to quantum mechanics, including the theory of phase transition and the Ehrenfest theorem. He befriended Albert Einstein on a visit to Prague in 1912 and became a professor in Leiden, where he frequently hosted Einstein. Suffering from depression, in 1933 Ehrenfest killed his disabled son, Wassik, and then himself.
Biography
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Paul Ehrenfest” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.