He was born in 1872 into an upper-class family in
Vorder-Brühl, near
Vienna, to father Wilhelm and mother Teofila (née Szczepanowska). He attended the prestigious
Collegium Theresianum and subsequently studied physics at the
University of Vienna (1890-95). In 1895, he obtained his doctorate based on his dissertation entitled
Acoustical Studies of Elasticity of Soft Materials. His teachers included
Franz S. Exner and
Josef Stefan.
Ludwig Boltzmann held a position at the
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München during Smoluchowski's studies in
Vienna, and Boltzmann returned to Vienna in 1894 when Smoluchowski was serving in the Austrian army. They apparently had no direct contact, although Smoluchowski's work follows in the tradition of Boltzmann's ideas. After several years at other universities (Paris, Glasgow, Berlin), in 1899 Smoluchowski moved to
Lwów (present-day Lviv), where he took a position at the
University of Lwów. He was president of the
Polish Copernicus Society of Naturalists, (1906–1907). In 1913, Smoluchowski moved to
Kraków to take over a chair in the Experimental Physics Department, succeeding
August Witkowski, who had long envisioned Smoluchowski as his successor. When
World War I began the following year, the work conditions became unusually difficult, as the spacious and modern Physics Department building, built by Witkowski a short time before, was turned into a military hospital. The possibility of working in that building had been one of the reasons Smoluchowski had decided to move to Kraków. Smoluchowski was now forced to work in the apartment of the late Professor
Karol Olszewski. During his lectures in experimental physics, use of even the simplest demonstration equipment was virtually impossible. Smoluchowski lectured in experimental physics; his students included
Józef Patkowski,
Stanisław Loria and
Wacław Dziewulski. Smoluchowski was a member of the Copernicus Society of Natural Scientists and the Polish Academy of Sciences and Letters. Smoluchowski died in
Kraków in 1917, as a result of a
dysentery epidemic. Professor
Władysław Natanson wrote in an obituary of Smoluchowski: "With great pleasure I recall the charm of his life, his noble cordiality, combined with exquisite kindness. I wish I could render the curious appeal of his personality, recall how temperate he was, how modest and elegantly diffident, yet always full of a pure, spontaneous joy." ==Work==