Profile Major Works Resources

Karl Schlesinger, 1889-1938.

Hungarian-born Austrian banker and economist with a mathematical bent.

Karl Schlesinger studied at the University of Vienna, and resurrected Walras's theory of encaisse desirée in his relatively overlooked 1914 dissertation, written under Böhm-Bawerk.

Schlesinger fled Budapest in 1919, in the turmoil of the Hungarian socialist revolution of Bela Kun, and went on to establish a rather successful bank in Vienna.  Schlesinger participated in von Mises's Austrian economics seminar in Vienna and sought out Karl Menger as a tutor in mathematics in 1931, and eventually hired Abraham Wald in late 1932 as his private tutor.

Karl Schlesinger participated in  "Vienna Colloquium" organized by Karl Menger in the 1930s, and it was reportedly Schlesinger who introduced economics to be considered by mathematicians there. Schlesinger's famous 1935 paper (presented March 19, 1934) proposed the complementary slackness conditions and inequalities for the Walras-Cassel system and provided the key to Abraham Wald's eventual solution of the existence of equilibrium problem.

Schlesinger committed suicide in the Spring of 1938, the very day the Germany army set foot in Vienna.

 

  

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Major Works of Karl Schlesinger

  • Theorie der Geld und Kreditwirtschaft, 1914.
  • "Über die Produktionsgleichungen der ökonomischen Wertlehre" 1935, Ergebnisse eines mathematischen Kolloquiums, 1933-4  [English trans. "On the Production Equations of Economic Value Theory"]

 
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Resources on Karl Schlesinger

 

 
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