Clausius

Clausius, Rudolf Julius Emmanuel, was born at Koslin in Pomerania in 1822. Educated at the university of Berlin, he became professor of physics at the artillery school, until in 1855 he was called to a chair in the university of Zurich. Ten years later he received a similar appointment at Wurzburg, whence he passed to Bonn, where he died in 1888. His early scientific labours were devoted to optics, electricity, and the elasticity of bodies, but the great task of his life was the investigation of the real nature of heat, and the application of mathematical methods to thermodynamics, electricity, and the expansion of gases. His chief works are Die Mechanische Warmetheorie, and Die Mechanische Behandlung der Electrizitat. He also wrote treatises on mechanical physics and on the nature of heat, and a valuable essay entitled Das Potential-Function und das Potential.