Petzval

Józeph Miksa Petzval

Born: 1807 in Hungary
Died: 1891

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Petzval was professor at Vienna and worked for much of his life on the Laplace transform. He was influenced by the work of Liouville and wrote 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 it the Laplace transform.

Petzval is best remembered for his work on optical lenses and lens aberration in the early 1840's (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. 

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JOC/EFR February 1996