Finsler, Paul, 1894-1970

Paul Finsler (11 April 1894 – 29 April 1970) was a German and Swiss mathematician. Born in Heilbronn, Germany, Finsler did his undergraduate studies at the Technische Hochschule Stuttgart, and his graduate studies at the University of Göttingen, where he received his Ph.D. in 1919 under the supervision of Constantin Carathéodory. He studied for his habilitation at the University of Cologne, receiving it in 1922. He joined the faculty of the University of Zurich in 1927, and was promoted to ordinary professor there in 1944. He died on 29 April 1970. Finsler's thesis work concerned differential geometry, and Finsler spaces were named after him by Élie Cartan in 1934. 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. 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.