Paul Finsler

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

Prof. Finsler at the International Mathematical Congress, Zürich 1932.

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, as is the Finsler–Hadwiger theorem on a square derived from two other squares that share a vertex.[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]

Publications
  • Finsler, Paul (1918), Über Kurven und Flächen in allgemeinen Räumen, Dissertation, Göttingen, JFM 46.1131.02 (Reprinted by Birkhäuser (1951))[5]
  • Finsler, Paul (1926). "Gibt es Widersprüche in der Mathematik?". Jahresbericht der Deutschen Mathematiker-Vereinigung. 34: 143–154.
  • Finsler, Paul (1926). "Formale Beweise und die Entscheidbarkeit". Mathematische Zeitschrift. 25: 676–682. doi:10.1007/bf01283861. S2CID 121054124.
  • Finsler, Paul (1926). "Über die Grundlegung der Mengenlehre. Erster Teil". Mathematische Zeitschrift. 25: 683–713. doi:10.1007/bf01283862. Finsler, Paul (1963). "Über die Grundlegung der Mengenlehre. Zweiter Teil". Commentarii Mathematici Helvetici. 38 (1): 172–218. doi:10.1007/bf02566915. S2CID 124928448.
  • Finsler, P. (1933). "Die Existenz der Zahlenreihe und des Kontinuums". Commentarii Mathematici Helvetici. 5: 88–94. doi:10.1007/BF01297507. S2CID 120768947.
  • Finsler: Aufsätze zur Mengenlehre. (ed. G. Unger) 1975.
  • Booth, David; Ziegler, Renatus, eds. (1996). Finsler Set Theory: Platonism and Circularity. "Translation of Paul Finsler's papers on set theory with introductory comments". Birkhäuser Basel. doi:10.1007/978-3-0348-9031-1. ISBN 978-3-0348-9876-8.

References
  1. O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Paul Finsler", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews.
  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, S2CID 122841127.
  4. Breger, Herbert (1992), "A restoration that failed: Paul Finsler's theory of sets", in Gillies, Donald (ed.), Revolutions in Mathematics, Oxford University Press, pp. 249–264.
  5. Busemann, H. (1952). "Review: Über Kurven und Flächen in allgemeinen Räumen, by P. Finsler". Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 58 (1): 102. doi:10.1090/s0002-9904-1952-09572-0.

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