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Tatiana Ehrenfest

Russian mathematician
Also known as: Tatiana A. Afanassjewa

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Tatiana Ehrenfest was a Russian mathematician who, along with her husband Paul Ehrenfest, renounced their religions to move to Russia. There, they supported themselves with temporary teaching positions before Paul secured a professorship in the Netherlands.1

Together, the Ehrenfests published a significant review of statistical mechanics in 1911, highlighting key conceptual challenges in the field. Tatiana also contributed to the understanding of diffusion through the Ehrenfest model, which was developed to illustrate the statistical interpretation of the second law of thermodynamics.2

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