Richard Von Mises - Life

Life

Eighteen months after his brother, the Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises, Richard von Mises was born in Lemberg, then part of Austria-Hungary, into a Jewish family. His parents were Arthur Edler von Mises, a doctor of technical sciences who worked as an expert for the Austrian State Railways, and Adele Landau. Richard and Ludwig also had a younger brother, who died as an infant. Richard attended the Akademisches Gymnasium in Vienna, from which he graduated with honors in Latin and mathematics in Autumn 1901. After graduating in mathematics, physics and engineering from the Vienna University of Technology, he was appointed as Georg Hamel's assistant in Brünn (now Brno). In 1905, still a student, he published an article on "Zur konstruktiven Infinitesimalgeometrie der ebenen Kurven," in the prestigious Zeitschrift für Mathematik und Physik.

In 1908 Mises was awarded a doctorate from Vienna (his dissertation was on "the determination of flywheel masses in crank drives") and he received his habilitation from Brünn (now Brno) (on "Theory of the Waterwheels") to lecture on engineering. In 1909, at 26, he was appointed professor of applied mathematics in Straßburg, then part of the German Empire (now Strasbourg, Alsace, France) and received Prussian citizenship. His application for a teaching position at the Brno University of Technology was interrupted by World War I.

A pilot who had lectured on the design of aircraft and given in Straßburg the first university course on powered flight in 1913, he then joined the Austro-Hungarian army and flew as a test pilot and an instructor. In 1915, he supervised the construction of a 600-horsepower (450 kW) aircraft — the "Mises-Flugzeug" (Mises aircraft) for the Austrian army. It was completed in 1916, but never saw action.

After the war Mises held the new chair of hydrodynamics and aerodynamics at the Dresden Technische Hochschule. In 1919 he was appointed director (with full professorship) of the new Institute of Applied Mathematics created at the behest of Erhard Schmidt at the University of Berlin. In 1921 he founded the journal Zeitschrift für Angewandte Mathematik und Mechanik and became its editor.

With the rise of the National Socialist (Nazi) party to power in 1933, von Mises, felt his position threatened despite his World War I military service. He moved to Turkey, where he held the newly created chair of Pure and Applied Mathematics at the University of Istanbul. In 1939 he accepted a position in the United States, where he was appointed 1944 Gordon-McKay Professor of Aerodynamics and Applied Mathematics at Harvard University. He married Hilda Geiringer in 1943, who had been his assistant at the Institute and followed him to Turkey and then to the U.S. after losing her position in December 1933.

In 1950 Mises declined an offer of honorary membership from the Communist-dominated East German Academy of Science.