Von Mises was born in
Lemberg,
Austria-Hungary (today
Lviv, Ukraine) into a
Jewish family, eighteen months after his brother
Ludwig von Mises, who became a prominent
economist of the
Austrian School, a
heterodox school of economics. His parents were Arthur Edler von Mises, a doctor of technical sciences who worked for the
Austrian State Railways, and Adele Landau. Richard and Ludwig had a younger brother, Karl von Mises, who died as an infant from
Scarlet Fever. 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 (
Brno). In 1905, still a student, he published an article on the geometry of curves called "Zur konstruktiven Infinitesimalgeometrie der ebenen Kurven," in the prestigious
Zeitschrift für Mathematik und Physik. In 1908, von 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 (Brno) (on "Theory of the
Waterwheels") to lecture on engineering. In 1909, at 26, he was appointed professor of applied mathematics in
Strasbourg (then part of the
German Empire) and received
Prussian citizenship. His application for a teaching position at the
Brno University of Technology was interrupted by the
First World War. Before the war he had already become a pilot and lectured on aircraft design, and in 1913 at Strasbourg he gave the first university course on powered flight. At the outbreak of war it was natural for him to join the Austro-Hungarian army as a
test pilot and a flying 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 active service. After the war, von Mises held the new chair of
hydrodynamics and
aerodynamics at the
Dresden Technische Hochschule. In 1919 he was appointed director and full professor at 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 Party to power in 1933, Mises felt his position threatened, despite his
First World War military service. He moved to
Turkey, where he assumed the new chair of pure and
applied mathematics at the
University of Istanbul. In 1939 he accepted a position in the
United States, where in 1944 he was appointed as Gordon McKay Professor of Aerodynamics and Applied Mathematics at
Harvard University. In 1943 he married
Hilda Geiringer, a mathematician who had been his assistant at the Institute and moved with him to Turkey and then to the U.S. In 1950, von Mises declined honorary membership from the
Communist-dominated
East German Academy of Science. ==Contributions==