Konstantinos Carathéodory was born on September 13, 1873, and went on to become one of the most important mathematicians...

Konstantinos Carathéodory was born on September 13, 1873, and went on to become one of the most important mathematicians of the 20th century, a man Albert Einstein personally sought out for help developing the theory of relativity. His roots ran deep into the Greek world of the East. His father, Stefanos Carathéodory, was a Greek Ottoman diplomat, and his mother, Despina Petrokokkinos, came from a Greek merchant family settled in Marseille. The family traced its origins to Adrianople, and his grandfather had served as a professor at the Medical School of Constantinople and personal physician to two Ottoman sultans. Carathéodory made foundational contributions to real analysis, the calculus of variations, and measure theory. His work on what became known as Carathéodory's theorem and his rigorous reformulation of thermodynamics placed him among the elite of European mathematical thought. He corresponded and collaborated directly with Einstein, who described him as irreplaceable. He lived through the catastrophe of Smyrna in 1922, one of the defining tragedies of the Greek world. He was working at the newly founded Ionian University in Smyrna when the city was destroyed and its Greek population expelled or massacred. He fled with almost nothing, but managed to save part of the university's library before the flames consumed the city. He eventually settled in Munich, where he taught at the university until his death in 1950. Despite living most of his adult life in Germany and Belgium, he never severed his connection to Greece or to the memory of the Greek East he had lost. Carathéodory represents a generation of Greeks from Anatolia who carried an entire civilization with them into exile, and transformed the institutions of Europe in the process. #GreekHistory #Smyrna #Greeks