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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.html)
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)