Paul Finsler (born April 11, 1894, in Heilbronn, Germany, died April 29, 1970 in Zurich, Switzerland) was a German and Swiss mathematician.[1]

Finsler did his undergraduate studies at the Technische Hochschule Stuttgart,[1] and his graduate studies at the University of Göttingen, where he received his Ph.D. in 1919 under the supervision of Constantin Carathéodory.[2] He studied for his habilitation at the University of Cologne, receiving it in 1922.[1] He joined the faculty of the University of Zurich in 1927, and was promoted to ordinary professor there in 1944.[1]

Finsler's thesis work concerned differential geometry, and Finsler spaces were named after him by Élie Cartan in 1934.[1] The Hadwiger–Finsler inequality, a relation between the side lengths and area of a triangle in the Euclidean plane, is named after Finsler and his co-author Hugo Hadwiger.[3] Finsler is also known for his work on the foundations of mathematics, developing a non-well-founded set theory with which he hoped to resolve the contradictions implied by Russell's paradox.[1][4]

References

1. ^ a b c d e f O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Paul Finsler", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews, http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Finsler.html .
2. ^ Paul Finsler at the Mathematics Genealogy Project.
3. ^ Finsler, Paul; Hadwiger, Hugo (1937), "Einige Relationen im Dreieck", Commentarii Mathematici Helvetici 10 (1): 316–326, doi:10.1007/BF01214300 .
4. ^ Breger, Herbert (1992), "A restoration that failed: Paul Finsler's theory of sets", in Gillies, Donald, Revolutions in Mathematics, Oxford University Press, pp. 249–264 .

Additional reading

* Burckhardt, J. J. (1980), Die Mathematik an der Universität Zurich 1916-1950 unter den Professoren R. Fueter, A. Speiser und P. Finsler, Basel .