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Karl Menger, 1902-1985.
Austrian mathematician and philosopher.
Karl Menger was the only son of the Austrian School economist Carl Menger. Menger junior entered the University of Vienna in 1920, originally intending to study physics, but eventually switching and earning his doctorate in mathematics by 1924. Menger proceeded to the University of Amsterdam to work under intuitionist mathematician L.E.J. Brouwer. Two years later. Menger returned to Austria in 1927 to take up the position of professor of geometry at the University of Vienna. Shortly after his arrival, Menger was invited to attend the logical-positivist philosophical discussion group known as the "Vienna Circle" (f. 1922 by Moritz Schlick, Otto Neurath, etc.).
In economics, Karl Menger is best known for organizing the "Vienna Colloquium" in 1928, a mathematical colloquium which was an important forum for the resurrection of Walrasian general equilibrium theory in economics in the early 1930s. Menger also helped launch uncertainty theory. with his article on Bernoulli's expected utility hypothesis (1934), and encouraged John von Neumann to look into its axiomatization.
With the atmosphere deteriorating during the Austro-fascist Dolfuss regime and increasing Nazi agitation, Karl Menger left Austria in 1937, a year in advance of the Anschluss. He would spend the rest of his career in the United States, initially at Notre Dame, later (from 1946) at the Illinois Institute of Technology.
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