Encyclopedia > Sadi Carnot

  Article Content

Sadi Carnot

Sadi Carnot (Paris, June 1, 1796 - Paris, August 24, 1832) was a French mathematician who wrote on the principles of the second law of thermodynamics in his treatise on heat engines (Carnot cycle).

Sadi Carnot, a son of the eminent geometer Lazare Nicholas Marguerite Carnot, was the most eminent of Fourier's contemporaries who were interested in the theory of heat. Sadi Carnot was born at Paris, France, in 1796, and died there of cholera in 1832; he was an officer in the French army.

In 1824 he issued a short work entitled Réflexions sur la puissance motrice du feu, in which he attempted to determine in what way heat produced its mechanical effect. He made the mistake of assuming that heat was material, but his essay may be taken as initiating the modern theory of thermodynamics.

External link

  • Sadi Carnot (http://www-groups.dcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Carnot_Sadi)


The text of part of an earlier version of this article was taken from the public domain resource A Short Account of the History of Mathematics by W. W. Rouse Ball (4th Edition, 1908)



All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

 
  Search Encyclopedia

Search over one million articles, find something about almost anything!
 
 
  
  Featured Article
Springs, New York

... made up of individuals and 9.6% have someone living alone who is 65 years of age or older. The average household size is 2.57 and the average family size is 3.08. In ...

 
 
 
This page was created in 31 ms