Marian Smoluchowski

Marian Smoluchowski

Marian Ritter von Smolan Smoluchowski
Born (1872-05-28)28 May 1872
Vorder-Brühl, Austria-Hungary
Died 5 September 1917(1917-09-05) (aged 45)
Kraków, Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria
Residence Austria-Hungary
Nationality Polish
Fields Physicist
Institutions University of Lviv
Jagellonian University
Alma mater University of Vienna
Doctoral advisor Franz S. Exner and Joseph Stefan
Doctoral students Józef Patkowski
Stanisław Loria
Wacław Dziewulski
Known for Pioneering statistical physics
Smoluchowski equation
Einstein-Smoluchowski relation
Smoluchowski coagulation equation
Notable awards Haitinger Prize of the Vienna Academy of Sciences (1908)

Marian von Smoluchowski (Polish: [ˈmarjan smɔluˈxɔfski]; 28 May 1872 – 5 September 1917) was a Polish physicist who worked in the Polish territories of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was a pioneer of statistical physics, and an avid mountaineer.

Life

Born into an upper-class family in Vorder-Brühl, near Vienna, Smoluchowski studied physics at the University of Vienna. His teachers included Franz S. Exner and Joseph Stefan. Ludwig Boltzmann held a position at Munich University during Smoluchowski's studies in Vienna, and Boltzmann returned to Vienna in 1894 when Smoluchowski was serving in the Austrian army. They apparently had no direct contact, although Smoluchowski's work follows in the tradition of Boltzmann's ideas.

After several years at other universities (Paris, Glasgow, Berlin), in 1899 Smoluchowski moved to Lwów (present-day Lviv), where he took a position at the University of Lwów. He was president of the Polish Copernicus Society of Naturalists, 1906–7.

In 1913 Smoluchowski moved to Kraków to take over a chair in the Experimental Physics Department, succeeding August Witkowski, who had long envisioned Smoluchowski as his successor. When World War I began the following year, the work conditions became unusually difficult, as the spacious and modern Physics Department building, built by Witkowski a short time before, was turned into a military hospital. The possibility of working in that building had been one of the reasons Smoluchowski had decided to move to Kraków. Smoluchowski was now forced to work in the apartment of the late Professor Karol Olszewski. During his lectures in experimental physics, use of even the simplest demonstration equipment was virtually impossible.

Smoluchowski lectured in experimental physics; his students included Józef Patkowski, Stanisław Loria and Wacław Dziewulski.

Smoluchowski was a member of the Copernicus Society of Natural Scientists and the Polish Academy of Sciences and Letters.

His non-professional interests included skiing, mountain climbing in the Alps and the Tatra Mountains, watercolor painting, and playing the piano.

Smoluchowski died in Kraków in 1917, victim of a dysentery epidemic. Professor Władysław Natanson wrote in an obituary of Smoluchowski: "With great pleasure I recall the charm of his life, his noble cordiality, combined with exquisite kindness. I wish I could render the curious appeal of his personality, recall how temperate he was, how modest and elegantly diffident, yet always full of a pure, spontaneous joy."

In 1901 he had married Zofia Baraniecka, who survived him. They had two children, Aldona Smoluchowska (1902-84) and Roman Smoluchowski (1910-96). Roman became a notable physicist who worked in Poland, and after World War II settled in the United States (the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton).

Work

Smoluchowski's scientific output included fundamental work on the kinetic theory of matter. In 1904 he was the first to note the existence of density fluctuations in the gas phase, and in 1908 he was the first physicist to ascribe the phenomenon of critical opalescence to large density fluctuations. His investigations also concerned the blue color of the sky as a consequence of light dispersion on fluctuations in the atmosphere, as well as explanation of Brownian motion of particles. At that time he introduced equations which presently bear his name.

In 1906, independently of Albert Einstein, he described Brownian motion.[1] Smoluchowski presented an equation which became an important basis of the theory of stochastic processes.

In 1916 he proposed the equation of diffusion in an external potential field. This equation bears his name.

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ Smoluchowski, M. (1906), "Zur kinetischen Theorie der Brownschen Molekularbewegung und der Suspensionen" (PDF), Annalen der Physik, 21 (14): 756–780, Bibcode:1906AnP...326..756V, doi:10.1002/andp.19063261405, retrieved 2008-08-29

Literature

Media related to Marian Smoluchowski at Wikimedia Commons

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