Background

Richard Edler von Mises was born on April 19, 1883, in Lemberg, Austria-Hungary (now Lviv, Ukraine) to a Jewish family given the Austrian nobility. His father, Arthur Edler von Mises, worked for the Austrian State Railways as a technical expert. On his travels all over the empire, he was often accompanied by his family, and von Mises was born on one of these journeys. The family home was in Vienna. His mother was Adele von Landau. His father’s family included engineers, physicians, bankers, and civil servants. Among the members of his mother’s family were philologists and bibliophiles. Richard was the second son of the family, the elder son being Ludwig von Mises who went on to become as famous as Richard. Ludwig, who was about eighteen months older than Richard, went on to become an economist who contributed to liberalism in economic theory and made his belief in consumer power an important part of that theory. Richard also had a younger brother, who died as an infant.

Education

Richard von Mises attended the Akademisches Gymnasium in Vienna, from which he graduated with honors in Latin and mathematics in autumn 1901. It was on the technical course that von Mises embarked, studying mathematics, physics, and engineering at the Vienna University of Technology. Von Mises was awarded a doctorate in 1907 and the following year he was awarded his habilitation from the German Technical University in Brünn (now Masaryk University), becoming qualified to lecture on engineering and machine construction.

Career

After graduating von Mises was appointed as Georg Hamel's assistant in Brünn. The city of Brünn is today called Brno in the south-eastern Czech Republic. He was a professor of applied mathematics at Strasbourg from 1909 until 1918, although this was a period which was interrupted by World War I. Even before the outbreak of the war von Mises had qualified as a pilot and he gave the first university course on a powered flight in 1913. When war broke out von Mises joined the Austro-Hungarian army and piloted aircraft. He had lectured on the design of aircraft before the war and he now put this into practice leading a team that constructed a 600-horsepower plane for the Austrian army in 1915. In 1916 he published a booklet on the flight, under the auspices of the Luftfahrarsenal in Vienna. It went into many enlarged editions and is the basis of the Theory of Flight, published with collaborators in English toward the end of World War II. Other, allied topics to which he contributed were elasticity, plasticity, and turbulence.

After the end of the war, von Mises was appointed to a new chair of hydrodynamics and aerodynamics at the Technische Hochschule in Dresden. Appointed in 1919 he soon moved again, this time to the University of Berlin to become the director of the new Institute of Applied Mathematics which had been set up there.

The Institute of Applied Mathematics flourished under his control. In 1921 he founded the journal Zeitschrift für Angewandte Mathematik und Mechanik and he became the editor of the journal. In the first edition, he wrote an introduction stressing the wide range of applied mathematics and also the fact that the line between pure and applied mathematics is not a fixed one, but one which changes over time as different areas of "pure mathematics" find applications in practical situations.

Von Mises set up a new curriculum for applied mathematics at the university which spread over six semesters and included applications of mathematics to astronomy, geodesy, and technology.

Von Mises' Institute rapidly became a centre for research into areas such as probability, statistics, numerical solutions of differential equations, elasticity and aerodynamics. Von Mises was also an excellent lecturer.

On 30 January 1933, however, Hitler came to power and on 7 April 1933 the Civil Service Law provided the means of removing Jewish teachers from the universities, and of course also to remove those of Jewish descent from other roles. All civil servants who were not of Aryan descent (having one grandparent of the Jewish religion made someone non-Aryan) were to be retired. Von Mises in one sense was not Jewish for he was a Roman Catholic by religion. He still fell under the non-Aryan definition of the act but there was an exemption clause which exempted non-Aryans who had fought in World War I. Von Mises certainly qualified under this clause and it would have allowed him to keep his chair in Berlin in 1933. He realized, quite correctly, that the exemption clause would not save him for long. On 10 June 1933 he wrote to von Kármán about a young German, Walter Tollmien, who was looking for a position.

Von Mises saw an offer of a chair in Turkey as a way out of his predicament in Germany but he tried to ensure that his pension rights were preserved. On 12 October 1933, he wrote to the ministry explaining that it would benefit Germany if he accepted a post in Turkey and that he should be allowed to retain his pension rights for his 24 years of service. He received the reply that he would have to relinquish all rights of a salary, a pension or support for his dependents. He protested in a further letter to the Ministry that he was legally entitled to rights that he was not prepared to relinquish. The Nazi Theodor Vahlen wanted to take over as director of the Institute despite poor academic qualities. He promised von Mises that if he would support him to succeed as Director of the Institute then he would ensure that von Mises would not lose his pension rights.

In October 1933 von Mises wrote his letter to support Vahlen as his successor. Vahlen was appointed Director of the Institute in December 1933. Having taken up the new chair in Istanbul, von Mises received a letter in January 1934 denying him any rights at all. It was something that von Mises continued to feel extremely aggrieved about, writing to the Ministry in 1953, shortly before his death, still trying to restore his rights.

In 1938 Kemal Atatürk died and those in Turkey who had fled from the Nazis feared that their safe haven would become unsafe. In 1939 von Mises left Turkey for the United States. He became a professor at Harvard University and in 1944 he was appointed Gordon-McKay Professor of Aerodynamics and Applied Mathematics there.

In von Mises' book Positivism: A Study in Human Understanding (1951) he expressed his views on science and life.

Achievements

• Von Mises was principally known for his work on the foundations of probability and statistics (randomness) which was rehabilitated in the 1960s. He founded a school of applied mathematics in Berlin and wrote the first textbook on philosophical positivism in 1939. He gave the first university course on a powered flight in 1913. In solid mechanics, von Mises made an important contribution to the theory of plasticity by formulating what has become known as the von Mises yield criterion, independently of Tytus Maksymilian Huber. He is also often credited for the Principle of Maximum Plastic Dissipation. The Gesellschaft für Angewandte Mathematik und Mechanik (International Association of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics) has awarded a Richard von Mises-Preis (Prize) since 1989.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Probability, Statistics and Truth

    (Step by step, in clear, simple language and with exceptio...)

    1928
  • Mathematical Theory of Compressible Fluid Flow

    (This text on compressible flow, unfinished upon von Mises...)

  • Mathematical Theory of Probability and Statistics, Richard von Mises, Hilda Geiringer - Amazon.com

    (Mathematical Theory of Probability and Statistics focuses...)

    1964
  • Theory of Flight

    (Designed for the college senior or beginning graduate stu...)

    1945
  • Fluid Dynamics

    (Their notes were prepared in mimeograph form and given a ...)

    1971
  • Studies in Mathematics and Mechanics, Richard von Mises - Amazon.com

    (The book contains 42 chapters organized into five parts. ...)

    1953
  • Advances in Applied Mechanics: Volume 2 1951
  • Advances in Applied Mechanics: Volume 3 1953
  • Positivism: A study in human understanding 1956
  • Die Differential Und Integralgleichungen Der Mechanik Und Physik 1931
  • Theorie Der Wasserräder 1909
  • Elemente der Technischen Hydromechanik : I. Teil 1914
  • Selected papers of Richard von Mises 1963

Religion

Von Mises was a Roman Catholic despite his Jewish origin.

Politics

Von Mises was involved in a controversy with the German Nazi regime due to his Jewish descent.

Views

Von Mises worked on fluid mechanics, aerodynamics, aeronautics, statistics and probability theory. He classified his own work, not long before his death, into eight areas: practical analysis, integral and differential equations, mechanics, hydrodynamics and aerodynamics, constructive geometry, probability calculus, statistics, and philosophy. He introduced a stress tensor which was used in the study of the strength of materials. His studies of wing theory for aircraft led him to investigate turbulence. Much of his work involved numerical methods and this led him to develop new techniques in numerical analysis. His most famous, and at the same time most controversial, work was in probability theory.

Von Mises made considerable progress in the area of frequency analysis which was started by Venn. He combined the idea of a Venn limit and a random sequence of events.

The intuitive appeal of von Mises’ limiting frequency theory is strong, and its spirit has influenced all modern statisticians. Remarkably, however, the mathematics of the theory, even after sophistication by leading probabilists, has never been rendered widely acceptable, and some authorities today do not mention Von Mises. In advanced work, the measure-theoretic approach initiated by Kolmogorov in 1933 is most favored. On the practical side, his statistical writings suffered from a foible: he denied the importance of small-sample theory. Von Mises’ Probability, Statistics, and Truth, published in German in 1928 and in English in 1939, is not a pedagogic text but a semipopular account, very subjective in tone, good on the historic side, and in general notably stimulating.

The interest in philosophy was only one of von Mises' interests outside the realm of mathematics.

Membership

Von Mises was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. In 1950 von Mises was offered honorary membership of the East German Academy of Science. This was difficult for von Mises, particularly in McCarthy era America where any link with communism would have been viewed as a serious offense. He sadly declined the offer.

• 

  American Academy of Arts and Sciences , United States

• 

  German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina , Germany

Personality

Von Mises was considered truly aristocratic, seeming proud and haughty to many. However, his conduct in many difficult situations, not least when he sent CARE (Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere) parcels to colleagues in Europe after World War II, showed what compassionate and loyal a human being he actually was.

Von Mises loved poetry: He could recite long passages from Goethe, as well as from such modern poets as Hofmannsthal, Verlaine, Altenberg, and, in particular, Rilke. In Rilke’s esoteric poetry he found a confirmation of his belief that in areas of life not yet explored by science, poetry expresses the experiences of the mind. Von Mises was a recognized authority on the life and work of Rilke. Over a lifetime, he compiled the largest privately owned Rilke collection (now at Harvard’s Hough ton Library), for which a 400-page catalogue was published in 1966 by the Insel Verlag, Leipzig.

Interests

• poetry

• Writers

  Rainer Maria Rilke, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Paul-Marie Verlaine, Peter Altenberg

Connections

The mathematician Hilda Geiringer followed von Mises to Istanbul in 1934. There she was appointed as professor of mathematics. Later Geiringer followed him to the United States and they were married in 1943.

Father:

Arthur Edler von Mises

Mother:

Adele von Landau

Brother:

Ludwig von Mises

Wife:

Hilda Geiringer

Doctoral advisor:

Georg Hamel

References

• Dictionary of Scientific Biography: Volumes 9 & 10
  1981
• Österreichische Mathematik und Physik: Wolfgang Gröbner, Richard von Mises, Wolfgang Pauli
  1993