Gyula Farkas (natural scientist)
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Gyula Farkas de Kisbarnak | |
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Born | |
Died | December 27, 1930 | (aged 83)
Nationality | Hungarian |
Alma mater | Royal University of Pest |
Known for | Farkas' lemma |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Mathematics Physics |
Gyula Farkas de Kisbarnak or Julius Farkas de Kisbarnak (
Biography
Farkas was born on March 28, 1847, in Sárosd, Hungary. He was the eldest of seven children in a
His family moved around a lot but Farkas attended the
In 1886, Farkas was nominated for a professorship of mathematical physics at
Farkas had remarried after the death of his first wife. He lived alone after the death of second wife in 1915. He moved in with relatives a few months before his death on December 27, 1930 in Pestszentlőrinc.
He made a contribution to linear algebra with Farkas' lemma, which is named after him for his derivation of it. In 1894, Farkas gave a mathematical formulation to the mechanical principle of Fourier and developed a theory of linear inequalities to derive the necessary condition for the equilibrium of a mechanical system. This was an extension of Lagrange’s work on the mechanical principle of Courtivron which used equality constraints. Farkas’ work introduced inequality constraints and showed that Lagrange’s theory was a special case. If the forces in a system are conservative, finding the necessary condition for equilibrium is equivalent to minimizing the potential subject to constraints. This led to his formulation of the necessary condition of optimality of nonlinear programming in an analytical mechanical framework.
Farkas was elected a corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1898 and a full member in 1914. Farkas was highly respected for his noble personal qualities and talent in organization. He had significant contributions to applied mathematics, mechanical equilibrium, thermodynamics, and electrodynamics. His habilitation was about complex functions and quaternions. Farkas gave conditions for the solvability of Schröder's functional equation in 1884.[2] His results in hydrodynamics and thermodynamics were discussed in the second volume of the Woldemar Voigt's ‘Mathematische Physik’, published in 1896. His physics papers were mathematically rigorous and at the same level as other contemporary papers on physics. His best-known mathematical paper was ‘Theorie der einfachen Ungleichungen’ published in 1901 where he proved his inequality theorem. Farkas was among the first to have a modern approach to entropy and derived the Carnot-Clausius principle mathematically fourteen years before Carathéodory. He was the first in Hungary to have lectures on the special theory of relativity.
Literary works
His principal writings are embodied in the reports of the Academy of Science of Paris (1878–1884)
- the "Archiv der Mathematik und Physik"
- the "Journal des Mathematiques"
His separately published works are:
- "Die diatonische Dur-Scale wissenschaftlich begründet", Pest, 1870
- "Természettan elemei" (Elements of Physics), Székesfehérvár, 1872
See also
References
External links
- This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Isidore Singer & Ludwig Venetianer (1901–1906). "Gyula Farkas". In Singer, Isidore; et al. (eds.). The Jewish Encyclopedia. New York: Funk & Wagnalls.
- Farkas bio (English) Archived 2006-09-16 at the Wayback Machine
- Who was Guyla Farkas