Boltzmann, caos y mecánica estadística.

Resumen

One hundred years ago Ludwig Boltzmann, who was one of the founding fathers of statistical mechanics, passed away. Some of the developments that have taken place during this century, with special emphasis to the role played by nonlinear dynamics, and in particular chaos theory, on the foundations of nonequilibrium statistical mechanics and the origin of irreversibility, are described in this article. There have been remarkable advances, nevertheless there are still many unsolved open problems waiting for the contributions of new generations of physicists.