Philipp von Jolly

Who was Philipp von Jolly?

Johann Philipp Gustav von Jolly was a German physicist and mathematician.

Born in Mannheim as the son of merchant Louis Jolly and Marie Eleonore Jolly, he studied science in Heidelberg, Vienna and Berlin. After his studies, he was appointed professor of mathematics in Heidelberg in 1839 and in physics in 1846. He moved to Munich in 1854 where he took the position once held by Georg Simon Ohm. In 1854 he was knighted.

Jolly was first and foremost an experimental physicist. He measured the acceleration due to gravity with precision weights and also worked on osmosis.

One of his students at the University of Munich was Max Planck, whom he advised in 1878 not to go into physics, saying, "in this field, almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few unimportant holes." Planck replied that he didn't wish to discover new things, only to understand the known fundamentals of the field. Nevertheless, Planck's work opened up the field of quantum physics.

Jolly died in Munich.