218 - Österreichische Mathematische Gesellschaft

Internat. Math. Nachrichten
Nr. 218 (2011), 1–10
Franz Alt 1910–2011
Karl Sigmund, Josef Teichmann ∗ und Walter Schachermayer
Universität Wien und ∗ ETH Zürich
Franz Alt passed away peacefully on July 21, 2011, in New York.
Alt was born in Vienna, on November 30, 1910, and had to escape from the Third
Reich in 1938. He participated in two particularly rich and seminal episodes in the
history of science. In the Thirties, in Vienna, he was a member of the Mathematical
Colloquium, which was an immediate off-shoot of the famous Vienna Circle,
and included luminaries such as Kurt Gödel, Karl Menger, Abraham Wald, Oskar
Morgenstern and Karl Popper. In the United States, during the post-war years,
Franz Alt became instrumental in the development of the first modern computers.
He was a founder, and one of the first presidents, of the Association for Computing
Machinery.
Franz Alt came from a secular Jewish family which had moved from Moravia
to Vienna. He went to school in the Stubenbastei Gymnasium. His father was a
lawyer and wanted Franz to study law and to eventually take over his law-firm. But
the young man was determined to study mathematics, in spite of the job prospects
which were poor, at the time, and would soon turn worse. In due time, Franz’
younger brother Friedrich (Fred) would step into their father’s shoes.
When Franz enrolled at the University of Vienna, in 1928, the Institute of
Mathematics was dominated by three great figures, Wilhelm Wirtinger, Philipp
Furtwängler and Hans Hahn. But many of the young students rallied around the
newly-appointed associate professor of geometry, Karl Menger. Karl Menger was
only eight years older than Franz Alt. As a student, Menger had been the favourite
student of Hahn, and he became one of the co-founders of topological dimension
theory. Menger spent postdoc years with Brouwer in Amsterdam. Returning to
Vienna as a twenty-five-year old professor, he quickly started to establish a mathematical
circle, or Colloquium, along the lines of the Vienna Circle, but differing
from the role model in several important points. In particular, the proceedings of
the seminar talks and discussions were published in a yearly volume, the Ergebnisse
eines Mathematischen Kolloquiums. The young student Franz Alt, who had
first distinguished himself in Hahn’s seminar, became a mainstay of the Colloquium
from the spring of 1930 on.
ISSN 0020-7926 c○ 2011 Österr. Math. Gesellschaft