Private Life and Hobbies
Petzval was a good sportsman and rider. As a young child, he often traveled with his family to the High Tatras, and was also a dedicated athlete. In Vienna, he was for a long time the best fencer and ring fighter in the city. He also inherited an excellent talent for music from his father. Allegedly, while he was a lecturer in Vienna, he always rode to his lectures on a black Arabian horse.
Petzval never wanted to communicate anything about his private life, and was therefore relatively inscrutable to others during his lifetime. As Dr. Ermenyi described in his book, Dr. Josef Petzval's Life
- ". . . he went so far as to always insert a bare point, for example, use the appearing annual yearbook of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, in whatever apart from the names of the members the date and the place appear aforementioned to the birth for itself into this column."
At the end of his life he lived in increasingly greater isolation in his "castle" on Kahlenberg, with only his horse for company, although several academies and scholarly societies appointed him a member (member of the Academy of Sciences in Vienna (1846/1849), external member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1873), honorary member of the Union of the Czech mathematicians and physicists (1881), carriers of the French Charles Chevalier Platinmedaille, and others).
Read more about this topic: Joseph Petzval
Famous quotes containing the words private life, private, life and/or hobbies:
“The others “acted” a role; I was the role. She who was Mary Garden died that it might live. That was my genius ... and my sacrifice. It drained off so much of me that by comparison my private life was empty. I could not give myself completely twice.”
—Mary Garden (1874–1967)
“There is no private house in which people can enjoy themselves so well as at a capital tavern.... No, Sir; there is nothing which has yet been contrived by man by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.”
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)
“Since it is impossible to know what’s really happening, we Peruvians lie, invent, dream and take refuge in illusion. Because of these strange circumstances, Peruvian life, a life in which so few actually do read, has become literary.”
—Mario Vargas Llosa (b. 1936)
“I spend so many times for skating, and I gave up so many hobbies for this ... the Olympics are four years in time. And I am old.”
—Ye Qiaobo (b. 1965)