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He died by murder-suicide in 1933; he killed his disabled son Wassik, and then himself. Biography. Paul Ehrenfest was born on 18 January 1880 in Vienna to Jewish parents, [3] who were originally from Loštice in Moravia (now part of the Czech Republic ). His parents, Sigmund Ehrenfest and Johanna Jellinek, ran a grocery store.
His student Paul Ehrenfest committed suicide. Ehrenfest’s student, George Uhlenbeck, was my advisor. If Uhlenbeck commits suicide, I’m next.” Dresden died of cancer in 1997, but I still...
After arriving at the institute, Ehrenfest met his son in the waiting room. There he shot Wassik in the head with a pistol, and then he killed himself. It was an unfathomable end — an inconceivable act that betrayed a meaningful life. Paul Ehrenfest was a great scientist.
Ehrenfest’s student Hendrik Casimir wrote in his autobiography 7 that he couldn’t remember ever hearing Ehrenfest say anything personal about Boltzmann in any of their many conversations—some of them even touching on suicide.
Paul was apparently able to work himself out of his depression, which had sometimes been deep enough to make him contemplate suicide. His intellectual interests grew stronger, perhaps as a form of self-protection.
People who knew him well knew that for much of his life he had had bouts of depression. In modern language he was “bipolar.” He seems to have tried to commit suicide and finally succeeded in 1906 at age 62. Another example was the Austrian-born physicist Paul Ehrenfest.
Paul Ehrenfest was an Austrian theoretical physicist who helped clarify the foundations of quantum theory and statistical mechanics. Ehrenfest studied with Ludwig Boltzmann at the University of Vienna, where he received his doctorate in 1904.
