Includes bibliographical references and index.

Boltzmann kills himself -- Boltzmann is buried (not once, but twice) -- Start simple -- Before things got weird -- Post-mortem psychiatry -- But how crazy? -- Not quite big numbers -- Big enough numbers -- And everything in between -- A case for anxiety -- Of the many benefits of modernity -- And yet it moves -- Follow the leader -- The night before -- The next day -- One's harshest critic -- Something like a mathematical supplement -- You may now return to your seats -- Boltzmann's constant -- Human factors -- In search of a better analogy -- Equilibrium you can count on -- A rigorous examination of the obvious -- The farewell tour -- An alternative ending.

"This is a story about a man and his equation. We learn in this story that entropy is the central quantity in something called the second law of thermodynamics. The second law is always on, running in the background of our lives, providing us with a way to differentiate between past and future. It provides us with an arrow of time: we know that the future will be a state of higher entropy than the past. And we have Boltzmann to thank for discovering the equation that underlies that fundamental trend. The manuscript assembles the equation S = k log W (where S represents entropy) from its constituent parts. Throughout the book, the author also introduce scenes from Boltzmann's life and explores the nature of his mental illness, which he concludes was primarily an anxiety disorder. His goal is to build a meaningful equation and a sympathetic portrayal of a man whose flaws were as compelling as his intellect"--