Władysław Natanson

Władysław Natanson (1864–1937) was a Polish physicist.

Life

He came from a Jewish family of bankers, being the grandson of Samuel Natanson (1795–1879), the son of Ludwik Natanson (1821–1896), a physician, and Natalia Epstein. His brother was the industrialist Edward Natanson (1861–1940), father of physicist Ludwik Karol Natanson (1905–1992).

Natanson was head of Theoretical Physics at Kraków University from 1899 to 1935.^[1][2]

He published a series of papers on thermodynamically irreversible processes, gaining him recognition in the rapidly growing field. He was the first to consider the distinguishability of energy quanta in the statistical analysis of elementary processes, a precursor of the concept of quantum indistinguishability. He discovered a quantum statistics, rediscovered 11 years later by Satyendra Nath Bose and generalized by Albert Einstein though his derivation was not in terms of einstein's light quanta aka photons – the Bose–Einstein statistics.^[3][4]

See also

• List of Poles (physicicsts)

Notes

1. Theoretical Physics in Poland Before 1939, Retrieved March 29, 2010
2. Średniawa, Bronisław (2007). "Władysław Natanson (1864–1937)" (PDF). The Old and New Concepts of Physics. IV: 705. Retrieved October 26, 2011.
3. Max Jammer (1966). The conceptual development of quantum mechanics. McGraw-Hill. p. 51. ISBN 0-88318-617-9.
4. Natanson, Władysław (1911). "On the statistical theory of radiation". Bulletin de l'Académie des Sciences de Cracovie (A): 134–148. Natanson, Władysław (1911). "Über die statistische Theorie der Strahlung". Physikalische Zeitschrift. 12: 659–666.