Even prior to the pandemic, the amount of people I know who have struggled with challenges, especially due to mental health, is somewhat staggering. This year has been quite the journey, and many people I know, especially my peers, are worse off for it in various ways.
I chose to write about Boltzmann because right now, everyone is majorly stressed out. Interestingly, he was also a popular philosophy professor. He had a number of discoveries proven theoretically at the time, and experimentally verified shortly after the turn of the century. Boltzmann's constant is present within the ideal gas constant (the R in PV=nRT), which I have learned about in both chemistry and now in physics, while the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution for the predicted speeds of a moving atom of gas was just covered in my physics class this semester.
He was also responsible for many developments in thermodynamics and laid the groundwork for the field of statistical mechanics. He received professorship positions at several universities, with many figures such as Lise Meitner (female, Jewish, smuggled out of Austria right in time but lost credit for her discoveries in nuclear fission, very neat gal read up on her) among his students. He was a mathematician and physicist, born in Austria in 1844. I decided to not write about the same scientist, as after all there are very many to choose from! However, instead of finding someone obscure, I went for a relatively big name: Ludwig Boltzmann.
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