Josef Stefan


Stefan, Josef

 

Born Mar. 24,1835, in St. Peter, near the city of Klagenfurt; died Jan. 7, 1893, in Vienna. Austrian physicist. Member of the Vienna Academy of Sciences (1865).

Stefan studied at the University of Vienna from 1853 to 1858. He became an instructor in a private Realschule in Vienna in 1858 and a professor at the University of Vienna in 1863.

In 1879, Stefan showed experimentally that the energy radiated by a heated body is proportional to the fourth power of the body’s absolute temperature (the Stefan-Boltzmann law). Stefan also worked in such areas as optics, the physics of heat, capillarity, diffusion, and electromagnetic phenomena.

REFERENCE

Suess, E. “Mit Nekrologen und Porträts von: I. Stefan.” Almanachder kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1893, vol. 43, pp. 252–57.