I got a collection of all of Caratheodory's letters and bio stuff :)

[Kyriakos]

So, anyone have read things by him? Can you propose anything i should look at first? I only know (very very little) about his "adiabatic progression" idea and model, and that he was mostly using geometry and conic sections in that (mostly hyperbola).

 

[Takhisis]

Has he -or rather, his work- been translated?

 

[Kyriakos]

You mean into math?

( )

Afaik he mostly held uni positions in Germany, including Berlin. He also had a large communication with Einstein due to the latter asking him for math help in his backing of the general relativity theory. He spoke greek, of course, and was asked by Eleutherios Venizelos to be head of the newly formed Smyrna university. He also reformed the university here and in Athens.

Without a doubt he was a very important 20th century mathematician, and one of the last true greats in the field

Constantin Carathéodory (or Constantine Karatheodori; Greek: Κωνσταντίνος Καραθεοδωρή; 13 September 1873 – 2 February 1950) was a Greek mathematician who spent most of his professional career in Germany. He made significant contributions to the theory of functions of a real variable, the calculus of variations, and measure theory. His work also includes important results in conformal representations and in the theory of boundary correspondence. In 1909, Carathéodory pioneered the Axiomatic Formulation of Thermodynamics along a purely geometrical approach.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantin_Carathéodory

 

[dutchfire]

His formulation of the second law of thermodynamics is rather nice.

 

[Kyriakos]

His formulation of the second law of thermodynamics is rather nice.

Does that formulation have maximum entropy?

 

[sophie]

So, anyone have read things by him? Can you propose anything i should look at first? I only know (very very little) about his "adiabatic progression" idea and model, and that he was mostly using geometry and conic sections in that (mostly hyperbola).

Link to video.

 

[Kyriakos]

^You're so edgy and cool, Owen.

 

[sophie]

^You're so edgy and cool, Owen.

 

[Gigaz]

Judging from his CV most things he did are so advanced that getting your m.sc. before reading the math part is advisable. Do you have his PhD-thesis? That sounds kind of interesting.

 

[Perfection]

Why are you interested in him?

 

[Kyriakos]

Judging from his CV most things he did are so advanced that getting your m.sc. before reading the math part is advisable. Do you have his PhD-thesis? That sounds kind of interesting.

Not yet there, currently i am at 1900 when Caratheodory (at 27 years of age) decides to leave his career as an engineer (supervised work at the Asuan dam project a few years before) and study mathematics. It seems that his first keen impression at that time was from a demonstration of an elegant solution to the so-called Fagnano's problem, by Schwarz (a then prominent math professor in Berlin) and Fejér in particular.

Fagnano's problem was (i read) about defining which inscribed triangle in a given acute triangle is the one with the smallest perimeter, and while Fagnano (18th century) approached the issue with calculus, Schwaz/Fejér used a purely geometrical solution.

Wiki article for Fagnano's problem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fagnano's_problem

Fejér with Caratheodory, some time later of course: