Joseph Petzval[4] (6 January 1807 – 17 September 1891[5]) was a mathematician, inventor, and physicist best known for his work in optics.

He was born in the town of Szepesbéla in the Kingdom of Hungary (in German: Zipser Bela, now Spišská Belá in Slovakia).

Petzval is considered to be one of the main founders of geometrical optics, modern photography and cinematography.

He is also credited with the discovery of the Laplace transform[citation needed] and is also known for his extensive work on aberration in optical systems.

The couple brought up six children: Gustáv Adolf (1800–1803), who died prematurely; Nestor Aemilianus (1804–1806); Joseph Maximilián (1807 - 1891); Petrol Baltazár (1809–1889); and three daughters.

One anecdote told about Petzval is as follows: When his family had already decided to make a shoemaker out of Petzval, he read the book Analytic Paper on the Elements of Mathematics by the German mathematician Hauser over the summer holidays, just after completing his fourth class in elementary school.

After finishing high school, Petzval decided to move to the Institutum Geometricum, the engineering faculty of the Pester University.

Before that, he had to complete a two-year lyceum, which he attended from 1823 to 1825 in Kassa (in German: Kaschau, today Košice, Slovakia).

When he arrived there in 1823, Petzval was already well-versed in the subjects of Latin, mathematical analysis, classical literature and stylistics.

[8] After completing the Lyceum, Petzval worked for a year as an educator for Count Almássy in the Heves county.

In addition to bringing in some urgently needed money, this experience also provided him with important social contacts.

In the same year, he joined the graduate degree program of the university, and became the self-appointed adjunct chair for the Physics Department (in 1831).

From 1828 to 1835, Petzval simultaneously worked as an urban engineer for the city of Buda—particularly as a specialist in flood abatement and sewers—and studied mathematics, mechanics and practical geometry.

1845 brought disputes with the entrepreneur Peter Wilhelm Friedrich von Voigtländer (1812–1878) over who had the right to produce Petzval's lenses.

Petzval learned of the invention from his friend, Viennese professor Andreas von Ettingshausen.

With Ettingshausen's urging, Petzval set up a workshop and laboratory at Kahlenberg in Vienna and, after six months of complex computations, produced designs for improved objective lenses for both portraiture and landscape photography.

The calculations these men carried out in tandem with each other have been regarded as an early (albeit human) example of a parallel computer.

The thermionic cameras were made from brass, using round daguerreotype plates which exposed a diameter of 8 cm.

The camera with the new landscape objective, produced by Dietzler, possessed a light foldable chamber with double bellows.

Among Petzval's other works are the invention of opera glasses, lens system calculations that led to the perfection of a telescope and microscope (1843), computations for efficient binoculars, and construction of new floodlights (1847).

Petzval can also be regarded as the inventor of the modern unastigmatic lens system, based on records from his estate.

Carl Freiherr Auer von Welsbach later applied this principle to the gas lamp he designed.

This objective made a distortion-free illustration of a large part of the sky, as well as permitting photographing of galaxies and star fields.

German optics companies (Töpfer, Voigtländerkorrigie, Zeiss) produced the Petzval objective lens until the 1940s.

The crater Petzval on the far side of the Moon is named after him, as are roads and statues in modern Slovakia, Austria, and Hungary.

The Austrian Board of Education has bestowed the "Petzval Medal" for special achievements in the area of scientific photography since 1928.

The Magyar Tudományos Akadémia Acta technica, Volume 25, 1959 notes a dispute over the ethnicity of Petzval.

"He lived 54 years of his life in Vienna, but could not become, and did not become a Viennese - devotedly to his native country, he remained a Hungarian."

Born in a region historically inhabited by Slovaks and Germans, Petzval initially struggled with the Hungarian language[14].