Josef Stefan

Born in Carinthia in 1835, Stefan moved through mathematics and physics in the Austrian Empire with uncommon range, writing poetry alongside his technical work. In 1879 he derived the law that radiation from a body scales with the fourth power of its temperature - a leap that turned thermal physics from guesswork into precision. The insight, later given theoretical grounding by his student Boltzmann, became the Stefan-Boltzmann law. He died in Vienna in January 1893, having shaped the physics of heat and light in ways that outlasted the empire he served.