Paul Finsler

Paul Finsler ( born April 11, 1894 in Heilbronn, † April 29, 1970 Zurich ) was a Swiss mathematician who worked on geometry ( Finsler spaces ) and foundations of mathematics.

Life and work

Finsler was the son of a Swiss businessman ( from old family of Zurich ) and the brother of Hans Finsler. He attended the Latin school in Urach and the Realgymnasiumin Cannstatt. 1912 Finsler began studying at the Technical University of Stuttgart, where he attended lectures by Martin Wilhelm Kutta. From 1913 he was at the University of Göttingen, where he studied with Erich Hecke, Felix Klein, Edmund Landau, David Hilbert, Max Born, Ludwig Prandtl and Carl Runge and earned his doctorate under Constantin Carathéodory 1919 ( over curves and surfaces in public spaces. 1918). In his thesis he introduced the Finsler spaces which generalize the Riemannian geometry and took up, among others, Elie Cartan ( he wrote in 1934 a book about it ). In 1922 he completed his habilitation at the University of Cologne, where he became private. Meanwhile, he had turned to the foundations of mathematics and set theory. In 1926 he wrote a fundamental work that anticipated Gödel's result, but was not further considered. In 1927 he became associate professor at the University of Zurich in 1944 and finally professor. In 1959 he became Professor Emeritus.

His originary access to set theory, first published in 1926 (the second part was not published until 1964), was rejected, not least because he made ​​use of a self-selected terminology that no one else used. His talk about it in the Mathematical Colloquium of University of Zurich and ETH Zurich has been harshly criticized by Hermann Weyl, why Finsler suffered a breakdown and was on leave. Finsler colleague Rudolf Fueter and Andreas Speiser then commissioned Johann Jakob Burckhardt Finsler ideas in an understandable form to bring and be published in the annual report of the German Mathematical Society.

Finsler was a Platonist and distrusted formalistic way of thinking. He was also involved in number theory, probability theory ( including on the probability of rare events ), and lastly graph theory.

Finsler was also amateur astronomer who discovered several comets (1924 and 1937, the second is named after him). Finsler remained single.

Writings

  • About Curves and surfaces in public spaces. Dissertation, 1951, reprinted by Birkhäuser.
  • Are there contradictions in mathematics? Inaugural lecture Cologne 1923 Annual Report DMV, Bd.34, 1926.
  • Formal proofs and decidability. Mathematical Journal 25, 676-682.
  • About the foundations of set theory. First part. Mathematical Journal, Bd.25, 1926, S.683 - 713. Second part. Commentarii Mathematici Helvetici ( CMH), Bd.38, 1964.
  • The existence of the series of numbers and the continuum. CMH 1933.
  • Finsler Essays for set theory. (Editor G. Unger) 1975.
Bad Urach Carl David Tolmé Runge Élie Cartan Platonism Johann Kaspar Lavater Integrated Authority File
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