Difference between revisions of "User:BlakeStacey"

Revision as of 15:57, 7 December 2006

Greetings. My name is Blake Stacey. I hail from the Greater MIT Metropolitan Area and have been a member of the Pynchonista since the fall of 2001. My first useful contribution in these parts was this {{spoiler template}}.

Science and mathematics topics to expand

This is downright intimidating. All of the following science and mathematics topics have either no entry beyond the bare name or the merest nubbin of an entry, usually copied from the Wikipedia. All of them deserve more.

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Boltzmann, Ludwig (1844–1906)

Austrian physicist who made pivotal contributions to thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, inventing several of the key notions of the latter field. The son of a taxation official, Boltzmann attended the University of Vienna and in 1866 earned a doctorate under the tutelage of Josef Stefan (1835–1893), whose empirical work on blackbody radiation Boltzmann would later put on a firm thermodynamic grounding. (Consequently, the statement that the total radiation from a blackbody goes as the fourth power of its temperature is today known as the Stefan–Boltzmann law.) After Stefan's death, Boltzmann took over his position as theoretical physics chair, but soon quit Vienna due to personal conflicts with the new chair of history and philosophy of science, Ernst Mach (1838–1916). He moved to Leipzig in 1900, where disputes over his theories led him to attempt suicide, unsuccessfully. Boltzmann returned to Vienna the following year, after Mach retired for health reasons, and in fact gained renown for his philosophy lectures — teaching the very class taught by Mach shortly before. In 1904, he traveled the United States, visiting the World's Fair in St. Louis; however, after his return to Europe, the attacks on his statistical mechanics work continued. Boltzmann committed suicide in Trieste, during a family vacation.

It is unknown whether Boltzmann's eventual suicide resulted from the scientific community's hostility to his work, a history of mental illness and melancholy, or some combination of both. (MacTutor biography)

Today, Boltzmann is renowned for having established a mathematical foundation of statistical physics, the study of large quantities of particles (such as atoms in a gas). To make calculations possible, Boltzmann devised the concept of an "ensemble", a set of many systems prepared in the same way. Thinking in terms of ensembles, one could calculate probabilities by working out what fraction of the ensemble's systems will exist in a given state. Each member of an ensemble satisfies the same macroscopic conditions; for example, they each have the same total energy. However, there are many different ways the atoms in a gas can move and still have the same total energy. Many microstates can be part of a single macrostate. The ensemble approach gave the first real understanding of what entropy means in statistical terms: the entropy of a macrostate is, up to a multiplicative factor, the logarithm of its number of microstates. (The multiplicative factor, known as Boltzmann's constant, sets the size of the degree marks on the temperature scale.)

Boltzmann also studied the way in which the entropy of a system rises with time. His mathematical deduction known as the H-theorem provided the first way to understand the Second Law of Thermodynamics in terms of individual atoms in motion.

Brownian movement The random motion of small particles, such as dust specks or pollen grains, suspended in a fluid. Because the atoms in the fluid are constantly jostling with thermal energy — heat being nothing but the kinetic energy of atoms in random movement — the larger objects floating in the fluid are bombarded this way and that, like a beach ball being attacked on all sides by peashooters. First observed by the British botanist Robert Brown (1773–1858) in 1827, this jittery behavior provided the first direct evidence that atoms existed. The young Albert Einstein (1879–1955) worked out the theory behind Brownian motion, producing in 1905 an equation which gave the size of atoms in terms of quantities one could observe about Brownian motion. In 1908, the French physicist Jean-Baptiste Perrin (1870–1942) succeeded in measuring these variables, discovering that atoms are roughly one ten-billionth of a meter in diameter.

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Crookes, Sir William (1832-1919)

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De Forest, Lee

Descartes, René (1596-1650)

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Edison, Thomas Alva (1847-1931)

Einstein, Albert

Euler, Leonhard (1707-1783)

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Faraday, Michael, FRS (1791-1867)

fractals

Freud, Sigmund

Frobenius, Ferdinand Georg (1849-1917)

Fuchs, Lazarus (1833-1902)

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Galois, Evariste

Gibbs, Professor Willard

Grassmann, Hermann (1809-1877)

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Hadamard, Jacques (1865-1963)

Halley, Edmond (1656-1742)

Hamilton, Sir William Rowan (1805-1865)

Hardy, Godfrey Harold "G. H." (1877-1947)

Heaviside, Oliver (1850-1925)

Hertz, Heinrich Rudolf (1857-1894)

Hilbert, David (1862-1943)

Hollow Earth

Hypatia (c. 370-415)

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Iamblichus of Chalcis (ca 245 - ca 325)

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Kepler, Johannes

Klein, Felix (1849-1925)

Kronecker, Leopold

Kovalevskaia, Sofia

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Lines of force

Lobatchevskian

Lodge, Sir Oliver Joseph (1851-1940)

Lombroso, Dr. Cesare (1835-1909)

Lorentz, Hendrik Antoon (1853-1928)

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Nansen, Fridtjof (1861-1930)

Nicol prism

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Ouspensky, Peter D. (1878-1947)

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perpetual-motion machine

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Quaternions

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Ramanujan

Rayleigh, Lord

Riemann, Georg Friedrich Bernhard (1826-1866)

Russell, Bertrand

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Schwarz, Hermann Amandus (1843–1921)

Skip — Ball lightning

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Tait, Peter Guthrie (P. G.) (1831-1901)

Tesla, Nikola (1856-1943)

Tesseract

Thucydides

Tunguska Event

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Vector

Von Waltershausen, Baron Wolfgang Sartorius

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Zodiac