Fran Bošnjaković (1902-1993) was a noted Croatian physicist.

Bošnjaković was born in Zagreb, where he was educated and where his scientific career started in 1926. In 1928 he moved to Dresden, Germany, where in 1931 he became a university teacher at Dresden High Mechanical Engineering School .

After a short stay in Belgrade, he moved back to the University of Zagreb in 1936. After 1945, during the Yugoslav communist regime, he was degraded to two years of forced labor. In 1951, he became rector of the University of Zagreb in Croatia. He worked at the Institute "Ruđer Bošković" in Zagreb.

In 1953, he started lecturing at the High technical school in Braunschweig in Germany, becoming the head of the Department for thermodynamics and director of the Thermotechnical institute. In 1961, he founded the Institute of Thermodynamics for Aeronautics and Astronautics at the University of Stuttgart, Germany, which he led until his retirement in 1968.

He also established groups for Irreversible Thermodynamics, Mass Transfer and Thermokinetics, Radiation and Plasma, and Heat Transfer. His textbook Technische Thermodynamik, published in 1935 in Dresden, had seven improved and extended editions in Germany, and was translated into English (Technical Thermodynamics) and Russian (Tehnicheskaya termodinamika).

As one of world's leading experts in thermodynamics, professor Bošnjaković was a member of Academies in Heidelberg and Venice, and of course, the member of Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Zagreb.

External links

• Institute Ruđer Bošković