Josef Stefan

Josef Stefan, known in Slovene as Jožef Štefan, was a Carinthian Slovene physicist, mathematician and poet of the Austrian Empire, born in 1835 in the village of St. Peter on the outskirts of Klagenfurt to ethnic Slovene parents of modest means. After graduating top of his class in high school he went to Vienna in 1853 to study mathematics and physics, earned his habilitation in mathematical physics at the University of Vienna in 1858 and published poems in Slovene during his student years. He taught physics at the University of Vienna, was director of its Physical Institute from 1866 and was vice-president of the Vienna Academy of Sciences. He published nearly 80 scientific articles and is best known for originating Stefan's law in 1879, which states that the total radiation from a black body is proportional to the fourth power of its thermodynamic temperature.