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born in the Austrian empire he established important principles of optics, mechanics, and wave dynamics and who supported the view that all knowledge is a conceptual organization of the data of sensory experience (or observation).
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was homeschooled till he was 14. when he turned 17 he was awarded a scholarship for the University of Vienna where he achieved his Degree in physics.
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Between 1873 and 1893 he developed optical and photographic techniques for the measurement of sound waves and wave propagation. In 1887 he established the principles of supersonics and the Mach number—the ratio of the velocity of an object to the velocity of sound. Link text
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Before his death Mach’s exceptionally rigorous criteria of verifiability led him to reject such metaphysical concepts as absolute time and space, and prepared the way for the Einstein relativity theory.