218 - Österreichische Mathematische Gesellschaft

Karl Menger’s letter to Franz Alt of December 31, 1937.
Hotelling, to whom he was introduced by Oskar Morgenstern. Alt worked at
the Econometric Institute from 1938 to 1946, with a significant interruption: two
years of military service in the US Army. His first application to join the army
had been rejected, because he counted as an enemy alien. He was to obtain US
citizenship only in 1944. But in 1943, he was drafted into the 10th Mountain Division,
and after officer’s training, eventually promoted to Second Lieutenant. His
specialized training did not only involve skiing and rock climbing, at which he
excelled. The Army became aware that Alt had other skills, too, and thus he was
assigned, towards the end of the war, to Aberdeen Proving Ground, and became
involved in the development of electronic computation. This was the time when
the first modern computers saw the light of day, electric monsters filling entire
rooms. Franz Alt, by a stroke of serendipity, belonged to the select few who participated
in the early pioneering developments, becoming one of the first to write
computer programs. When he returned to civilian life, he first resumed his job as
Assistant Director of Research at the Econometric Institute, but already in 1946,
he returned to Aberdeen, this time as a civilian. He collaborated, among others,
in the first test problems for the newly-built ENIAC, most famously in proving
primality of large numbers. Franz Alt also took a leading role in developing the
first stored-program computer in the US, the SEAC (the Standard Eastern Automatic
Computer, which still used acoustic delay lines). At the National Bureau
of Standards, Franz Alt became Deputy Chief, first of the Computing Laboratory
(1948–1952), which was headed by John Todd, Olga Taussky’s husband, and later
of the Applied Mathematics Division (1952–1967). There, Alt played an instrumental
role in promoting the use of computers at the Bureau and elsewhere in
the government, collaborating with George Dantzig, who developed linear programming
at the time and later would obtain a Nobel Prize in Economics. From
1962 to 1963, Alt was Chief of its Office of International Relations, and subsequently
Area Manager for Information Systems. He worked on the development
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