218 - Österreichische Mathematische Gesellschaft

The minutes of Franz Alt’s PhD defense are signed by Hans Thirring, Hans Hahn,
Karl Menger, Moritz Schlick, and Karl Bühler (Archiv Univ. Wien)
at about the same time, working on geometric generalizations of the concept of
between-ness. For a few years, Olga Taussky also took part in the Colloquium,
before moving to the US in 1934.
Menger did his best to help his young disciples, encouraging them to publish and
to travel. Thus Alt attended the ICM in Zürich in 1932, right after his PhD. Furthermore,
Menger arranged for Alt to give mathematical tutoring to economists.
Karl Menger’s father Carl had been the founder of the so-called Austrian School
of Economics. At nineteen, Karl had published the second (posthumous) edition
of the main treatise of his father, and he kept a lifelong interest in economic problems.
In particular, Karl Menger befriended the young director of the Institut für
Konjunkturforschung, Oskar Morgenstern. Gradually, mathematical economics
acquired a larger and larger place in the Colloquium. This led to several momentous
consequences. In particular, Abraham Wald published the first modern
equilibrium theorem in economics in the Ergebnisse, inspired by Karl Schlesinger.
Soon after, John von Neumann, a regular visitor to Vienna in the Thirties, would
publish his own equilibrium theory in the same journal. Another economics paper
submitted by Wald got lost in the turmoil of 1938. (Wald had also been inspired
through a Colloquium lecture by Karl Popper, a totally unknown philosopher at
the time, to develop foundations of probability theory based on the concept of
collectives.)
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