Carathéodory, Constantin

Born Sept. 13, 1873, in Berlin; died Feb. 2, 1950, in Munich. German mathematician.

Carathéodory graduated from the Belgian Military Academy in 1895 and studied mathematics in Berlin and Göttingen. He became a professor of the university in Munich in 1924. Carathéodory is the author of works on the theory of conformal mappings, the general theory of set measure, and a new formulation of the theory of the field of extremals (in the calculus of variations). In 1909 he gave a logically precise axiomatic formulation of the laws of thermodynamics.