Józeph Miksa Petzval
Born: 6 Jan 1807 in Szepesbla, Hungary (now Spisska Bela,
Slovakia)
Died: 17 Sept 1891 in Vienna,
Austria
There are different versions of Józeph Petzval's name, and, in addition to the one given here, he is often known as Jozef Maximilian Petzval.
Jozeph was the son of a schoolmaster and he attended schools in Levoca and Kosice. In 1826 he entered the University of Pest to study philosophy and mathematics. Later the town of Pest was to join with the town of Buda on the opposite bank of the Danube to form Budapest.
Petzval became an assistant at the University of Pest in 1835. Then, two years later, he accepted a chair of mathematics at the University of Vienna.
Petzval worked for much of his life on the Laplace transform. He was influenced by the work of Liouville and wrote both a long paper and a two volume treatise on the Laplace transform and its application to ordinary linear differential equations. His study is thorough but not entirely satisfactory since he was unable to use contour integration to invert the transform.
But for a student of Petzval we might today call the Laplace transform the Petzval transform. Petzval fell out with this student who then accused Petzval of plagiarising Laplace's work. Although this was untrue, Boole and Poincaré, influenced no doubt by the quarrel, called the transformation the Laplace transform.
Petzval is best remembered for his work on optical lenses and lens aberration done in the early 1840s (Petzval curvature is named after him) which allowed the construction of modern cameras. Petzval produced an achromatic portrait lens that was vastly superior to the simple meniscus lens then in use.
In [1] his work in optics is described as follows:-
[At the University of Vienna] he studied in detail L M Daguerre's invention, the so-called daguerreotype, and took on shortening its exposure time from minutes to seconds. In 1840, his extraordinary mathematical talent allowed him to assess and build an anastigmatic with six times greater luminosity. This Petzval highly luminous early form of photo lens was used by the enterprising Viennese optician Voigtländer, who launched its mass production and won a silver medal at the World's Exhibition Fair in Paris. Petzval also perfected the telescope and designed the opera glasses.
Petzval won many distinctions for his work. In addition to the medal referred to above, he was elected a member of the Academy of Science of Vienna, the Union of Czech Mathematics and he received the platinum medal of Ch Chevalier from France. A street in Vienna bears his name as does a crater on the far side of the Moon.