Abstract
The birth, raise, development and fortunes of a fundamental theory in thermodynamics, the axiomatic thermodynamics, a creation of Constantin Carathéodory, is thoroughly presented together with a summary of Carathéodory's biography. Axiomatic thermodynamics is centered around some interesting properties of Pfaffian differential equations, which are here introduced and used for some well-known cases in thermodynamics.
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Pogliani, L., Berberan-Santos, M.N. Constantin Carathéodory and the axiomatic thermodynamics. Journal of Mathematical Chemistry 28, 313–324 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1018834326958
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1018834326958