Ludwig Boltzmann’s grave (picture taken in 2008 by G. Qiu)
In spring 2008, we paid tribute to Ludwig Boltzmann, in front of his grave in Zentralfriedhof, Vienna, Austria.
Statistical mechanics, of which Boltzmann was the founder, studies the average behavior of a system with a large number of weakly-interacting identical components. At the end of the 19th century through the beginning of the 20th century while mathematics was the only analyzing tool, this was no doubt a magnificent work. However, when tackling problems related to systems with a finite number of strongly-interacting and non-identical components, we have no choice but to resort to computational approaches.