High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Rudolf Julius Emanuel Clausius, was a German physicist and mathematician and is considered one of the central founders of the science of thermodynamics. By his restatement of Sadi Carnot's principle known as the Carnot cycle, he put the theory of heat on a truer and sounder basis. His most important paper, On the mechanical theory of heat, published in 1850, first stated the basic ideas of the second law of thermodynamics. In 1865 he introduced the concept of entropy. Clausius was born in Köslin in the Province of Pomerania. He started his education at the school of his father. After a few years, he went to the Gymnasium in Stettin. Clausius graduated from the University of Berlin in 1844 where he studied Mathematics and Physics with, among others, Heinrich Magnus, Johann Dirichlet and Jakob Steiner. He also studied History with Leopold von Ranke.