Skip to content
Wellsprings
Paul Ehrenfest

Paul Ehrenfest

1880 CE–1933 CE · Vienna

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.

Adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

See Paul Ehrenfest’s journey on the map →

Life journeyclick any stop, or use ←/→Trace on the map →

Stop 1 of 2Born

ViennaוינהAustria

We know they were here, but the specifics of what they did at this stop aren’t recorded yet in our corpus.

About Vienna

Major Central European Jewish center pre-Holocaust. Home of Isaac of Vienna (Or Zarua), R. Shimshon Raphael Hirsch's training, R. Akiva Eger's son-in-law Chatam Sofer.

In Vienna at the same time

Ludwig Boltzmann, Sigmund Freud, Lise Meitner, Erwin Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauli

Across the traditions, in Vienna at the same time

See other sages who lived in Vienna→

In the same place & time

Sages whose lives overlapped with Paul Ehrenfest’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.

Across the traditions

The world in their lifetime

Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Paul Ehrenfest’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.

Works

No works attributed in the corpus yet.

Influenced byLudwig BoltzmannPaul EhrenfestShapedEnrico Fermi