Paul Finsler

Paul Finsler (1894 to 1970) was a German and Swiss mathematician born in Heilbronn. He studied at the Technische Hochschule Stuttgart and then at Gottingen, where he took his doctorate in 1919 under Constantin Caratheodory, and he completed his habilitation at the University of Cologne in 1922. He joined the University of Zurich in 1927 and became ordinary professor there in 1944. His thesis work was in differential geometry, and Finsler spaces were named after him by Elie Cartan in 1934. The Hadwiger-Finsler inequality, a relation between the side lengths and area of a triangle, and the Finsler-Hadwiger theorem on squares sharing a vertex also carry his name. He is further known for work on the foundations of mathematics, where he developed a non-well-founded set theory in the hope of resolving the contradictions that follow from Russell's paradox.