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George N. Hatsopoulos
Summary
George Nicholas Hatsopoulos (January 7, 1927 – September 20, 2018) was a Greek American mechanical engineer noted for his work in thermodynamics and for having founded Thermo Electron.
Hatsopoulos was born in Athens, Greece in 1927 and is related to the former rector of the Athens Polytechnic School, Nicolas Kitsikis. He attended Athens Polytechnic before entering MIT, where he received his Bachelor and Master of Science (1950), Mechanical Engineer (1954), and Doctorate of Science (1956).
In 1965, he and Joseph Keenan published their textbook Principles of General Thermodynamics, which restates the second law of thermodynamics in terms of the existence of stable equilibrium states. Their formulation of the second law of thermodynamics states that:
When an isolated system performs a process after the removal of a series of internal constraints, it will reach a unique state of equilibrium: this state of equilibrium is independent of the order in which the constraints are removed.
The Hatsopoulos-Keenan statement of the Second Law entails the Clausius, Kelvin-Planck, and Carathéodory statements of the Second Law, and has provided a basis to extend the traditional definition of entropy to the non-equilibrium domain.
In 1976, Hatsopoulos also contributed to a formulation of a unified theory of mechanics and thermodynamics, arguably a precursor of the emerging field of quantum thermodynamics.
While at MIT, Hatsopoulos was head of the engineering division of Matrad Corporation of New York. Matrad Corporation and MIT also provided financial support for his doctoral thesis The Thermo-Electron Engine. Matrad Corporation was owned by the family of Peter M. Nomikos, a Harvard Business School graduate. In 1956, Hatsopoulos founded the Thermo Electron Corporation with funding from Peter Nomikos. Several years later, George asked his brother (John Hatsopoulos) to join the company as financial controller. Under George Hatsopoulos, Thermo Electron became a major provider of analytical instruments and services for a variety of domains.
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