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The Fountain | Issue 29
By Dr Gerhard Fasol (1978)
The Fountain, Boltzmann and Japan Ever since I was a small child in Vienna, my great-grandfather, the mathematician, physicist and philosopher Ludwig Boltzmann (1844–1906), was a great inspiration. Over time I realized how strongly his results impact today's world. For example, I recently became friends with mathematician and politician Cedric Villani via the French Embassy in Tokyo. Cedric’s work in optimal transport is almost totally based on Boltzmann’s work, including the Boltzmann transport equations, and Cedric told me that he considers himself part of our family.
Among Boltzmann’s most important work is linking the macroscopically defined Entropy, which was introduced to optimize steam engines, to the atomic world using statistical mechanics, before the existence of atoms was generally accepted. He was puzzled about how Newton’s time reversible laws could lead to non-reversible thermodynamic