Paul Funk

Paul Georg Funk ( born April 14, 1886 in Vienna, † June 3, 1969 ) was an Austrian mathematician who worked on geometry and calculus of variations.

Life and work

Paul Funk was the son of a deputy bank manager and went in Baden near Vienna and Gmunden to high school. He studied mathematics and physics in Tübingen, Vienna and Göttingen, where he received his doctorate with David Hilbert in 1911 (over surfaces with a loud closed geodesics ). In 1915 he habilitated with a work on spherical harmonics at the Technical University of Prague, where he became associate professor in 1921 and professor in 1927. With the occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939, he lost his job and was deported in 1944 to Terezin, where he was liberated in 1945. In 1945 he was appointed professor at the Technical University of Vienna.

As has been tried several times in the 1960s, to select the electrical engineer Heinrich sequence as a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, put the radio as Academician persistently inputs and concerns a contrast.

Funk is best known for his work on the calculus of variations, of which he the standard work calculus of variations and its application in physics and engineering wrote (basic teachings of Mathematical Sciences, Springer -Verlag, 1962).