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Karl Menger

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Nationality
  
Austrian

Doctoral students
  
Fields
  
Name
  
Karl Menger


Alma mater
  
Role
  
Economist

Doctoral advisor
  
Children
  
Karl Menger

Karl Menger httpsuploadwikimediaorgwikipediacommons99

Born
  
January 13, 1902Vienna, Austria-Hungary (
1902-01-13
)

Institutions
  
Illinois Institute of TechnologyUniversity of Notre DameUniversity of Vienna

Died
  
February 26, 1921, Vienna, Austria

Books
  
Principles of Economics, Capital and Interest

Education
  
Jagiellonian University, University of Vienna, Charles University in Prague

Influenced
  
Eugen Bohm von Bawerk, Friedrich von Wieser

Similar People
  
Eugen Bohm von Bawerk, William Stanley Jevons, Leon Walras, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich von Wieser

KARL MENGER, L'ECONOMIE SANS LES MATHÉMATIQUES ?


Karl Menger (January 13, 1902 – October 5, 1985) was an Austrian-American mathematician. He was the son of the economist Carl Menger. He is credited with Menger's theorem. He worked on mathematics of algebras, algebra of geometries, curve and dimension theory, etc. Moreover, he contributed to game theory and social sciences.

Contents

Biography

Karl Menger was a student of Hans Hahn and received his PhD from the University of Vienna in 1924. L. E. J. Brouwer invited Menger in 1925 to teach at the University of Amsterdam. In 1927, he returned to Vienna to accept a professorship there. In 1930 and 1931 he was visiting lecturer at Harvard University and The Rice Institute. From 1937 to 1946 he was a professor at the University of Notre Dame. From 1946 to 1971, he was a professor at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. In 1983, IIT awarded Menger a Doctor of Humane Letters and Sciences degree.

Contributions to mathematics

His most famous popular contribution was the Menger sponge (mistakenly known as Sierpinski's sponge), a three-dimensional version of Sierpinski's carpet. It is also related to the Cantor set.

With Arthur Cayley, Menger is considered one of the founders of distance geometry; especially by having formalized definitions to the notions of angle and of curvature in terms of directly measurable physical quantities, namely ratios of distance values.

The characteristic mathematical expressions appearing in those definitions are Cayley–Menger determinants.

He was an active participant of the Vienna Circle which had discussions in the 1920s on social science and philosophy. During that time, he proved an important result on the St. Petersburg paradox with interesting applications to the utility theory in economics. Later he contributed to the development of game theory with Oskar Morgenstern.

Legacy

Menger's longest and last academic post was at the Illinois Institute of Technology, which hosts an annual IIT Karl Menger Lecture and offers the IIT Karl Menger Student Award to an exceptional student for scholarship each year.

References

Karl Menger Wikipedia