Vienna
Alt was born in Vienna, Austria on November 30, 1910 to a secular Jewish family. He received a PhD in mathematics in 1932 from the University of Vienna, with a thesis entitled "Metrische Definition der Krümmung einer Kurve" ("Metrical Definition of the Curvature of a Curve"). His principal teachers were Hans Hahn and Karl Menger. He was one of the regular participants in, and contributors to, Menger’s “Mathematisches Kolloquium.” Alt engaged in research in set-theoretic topology and logical foundations of geometry.
In addition, in the next few years he became interested in econometrics, stimulated by Oskar Morgenstern, then professor of economics at the University of Vienna, later at Princeton University. In 1936, Alt developed an axiomatic foundation for economic concepts, described in “Ueber die Messbarkeit des Nutzens,” which he presented at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Oslo. This paper was also published as “On the Measurability of Utility” in Preferences, Utility, and Demand: A Minnesota Symposium (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971).
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