Paul Ehrenfest

Paul Ehrenfest
Ehrenfest, c. 1910s
Born	(1880-01-18)18 January 1880 Vienna, Austria-Hungary
Died	25 September 1933(1933-09-25) (aged 53) Amsterdam, Netherlands
Cause of death	Murder-suicide
Alma mater	Vienna University of Technology University of Göttingen University of Vienna (PhD, 1904)
Known for	Ehrenfest model (1907) Ehrenfest paradox (1909) Work on nonradiation condition (1910) Coining the term ultraviolet catastrophe (1911) Ehrenfest theorem (1927)
Spouse	Tatyana Afanasyeva ​ (m. 1904)​
Children	4, including Tatyana
Scientific career
Fields	Theoretical physics
Institutions	Leiden University (1912–1933) Lorentz Institute
Doctoral advisor	Ludwig Boltzmann
Doctoral students	Johannes Martinus Burgers (1918) Hendrik Kramers (1919) Dirk Coster (1922) Samuel Goudsmit (1927) George Uhlenbeck (1927) Jan Tinbergen (1929) Arend Joan Rutgers (1930) Hendrik Casimir (1931)
Other notable students	Viktor Trkal Gerhard Heinrich Dieke

Paul Ehrenfest (German: [ˈpaʊl ˈeːʁənˌfɛst]; 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^[1] 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.^[2] Suffering from depression, Ehrenfest died by murder-suicide in 1933, killing his disabled son, Wassik, and then himself.