Franz Serafin Exner Jnr (German: [ˈfʁants ˈɛksnɐʁ]; 24 March 1849 – 15 October 1926) was an Austrian physicist and professor at the University of Vienna.

[1][2][3] The early introduction to university curricula of subjects such as radioactivity, spectroscopy, electrochemistry electricity in the atmosphere, and color theory in Austria are often credited to him.

Hochschule für Bodencultur" (Imperial College for Earth Sciences) which provided both a welcome supplementary income and the chance to share his ideas and insights with the large audiences attracted by his lectures.

He created a new "school for experimental physics" to which, through a rare combination of sound judgment and good fortune, he was able to entice a stellar generation of younger researchers.

By the time war ended, in 1918, Austro-Hungarian Empire was destroyed, and intensifying austerity had left university funding a long way down the list of public priorities.

Slightly more than ten years later, in 1937, a bronze tablet to his memory was produced by Michael Powolny and, with due ceremony, placed in the university's Arkadenhof in 1937.

At the start of 1896, at one of these gatherings, he showed some them a copy of "Ueber eine neue Art von Strahlen" ("On a new kind of [radioactive] ray") a brief learned article which he had received form the author, his friend since their time together in Zürich, Wilhelm Röntgen.

Röntgen, unlike his friend, was an exceptionally shy and self-contained scholar, but on New Year's Day 1896 he had, uncharacteristically, made a trip to the post office at Würzburg (the city where he lived and worked) with no fewer than 90 envelopes.

One of the colleagues to whom Exner showed his fiend's work was Ernst Lecher, established already as a talented experimental physicist, and a scholar-scientist for whose future career Röntgen's discoveries would prove pivotal.

After the little meeting, Exner left the book and the X-ray copies with Lechner, and news of Röntgen's invention very quickly found its way into the public consciousness across and beyond Europe through the Vienna press.

His most famous pupils included Marian Smoluchowski, a Viennese physicist of Polish descent, who discovered a theory of for Brownian motion, independently of Albert Einstein and Friedrich Hasenöhrl.

In 1914, Schrödinger received his Habilitation (higher postgraduate degree) with his "Studies on the kinetics of dielectrics, melting point, pyro- and piezoelectricity".