Constantin Carathéodory

Constantin Carathéodory (13 September 1873 to 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, and created an axiomatic formulation of thermodynamics. He is considered one of the greatest mathematicians of his era and the most renowned Greek mathematician since antiquity. He was born in Berlin to Greek parents and grew up in Brussels; his father Stephanos was a lawyer who served as Ottoman ambassador to Belgium, St Petersburg and Berlin, and his mother Despina Petrokokkinos came from the island of Chios. He had about twenty doctoral students, among them Hans Rademacher and Paul Finsler, and Albert Einstein contacted him for clarifications on the Hamilton-Jacobi equation.