Constantin Carathéodory
Greek mathematician (1873-1950)
Constantin Carathéodory (Greek: Κωνσταντίνος Καραθεοδωρή, romanized: Konstantinos Karatheodori; 13 September 1873 – 2 February 1950) was a Greek mathematician who spent most of his professional career in Germany. He made significant contributions to real and complex analysis, the calculus of variations, and measure theory. He also created an axiomatic formulation of thermodynamics. Carathéodory is considered one of the greatest mathematicians of his era and the most renowned Greek mathematician since antiquity.
Origins
Constantin Carathéodory was born in 1873 in Berlin to Greek parents and grew up in Brussels. His father Stephanos, a lawyer, served as the Ottoman ambassador to Belgium, St. Petersburg and Berlin. His mother, Despina, née Petrokokkinos, was from the island of Chios. The Carathéodory family, originally from Bosna, was well established and respected in Constantinople, and its members held many important governmental positions. His grandfather, the Ottoman Greek physician Constantinos Caratheodory, was the personal doctor to Sultan Abdülmecit I.
The Carathéodory family spent 1874–75 in Constantinople, where Constantin's paternal grandfather lived, while his father Stephanos was on leave.
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This entry incorporates text from “Constantin Carathéodory” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.