Entropy inequality and hydrodynamic limits for the Boltzmann equation

Abstract

Boltzmann brought a fundamental contribution to the understanding of the notion of entropy, by giving a microscopic formulation of the second principle of thermodynamics. His ingenious idea, motivated by the works of his contemporaries on the atomic nature of matter, consists of describing gases as huge systems of identical and indistinguishable elementary particles. The state of a gas can therefore be described in a statistical way. The evolution, which introduces couplings, loses part of the information, which is expressed by the decay of the so-called mathematical entropy (the opposite of physical entropy!). © 2013 The Author(s) Published by the Royal Society. All rights reserved.