Richard von Mises (19 April 1883 - 14 July 1953) was a scientist who worked on fluid mechanics, aerodynamics, aeronautics, statistics and probability theory.

He was born in Lemberg in Austria-Hungary (now Lviv, Ukraine), a younger brother of economist Ludwig von Mises. He studied at the Technical High School in Vienna, being awarded a doctorate in 1907. During World War I he was an Austrian pilot and designed aircraft.

In 1919 he was appointed to the new Institute of Applied Mathematics at the University of Berlin. He founded the journal Zeitschrift für Angewandte Mathematik und Mechanik and became editor.

Von Mises developed the Distortion energy theory of stress, which is one of the most important concepts used by engineers in material strength calculations.

With the rise of the Nazi party to power in 1933, von Mises (who was a Roman Catholic but categorised as "non-Aryan" because of his Jewish ancestry) moved to Turkey, and then in 1939 to the United States, where he became a professor at Harvard University. He married the mathematician Hilda Geiringer in 1943; she had followed him from Berlin to Turkey and then the US.

Richard von Mises died in Massachusetts.

External link

• St Andrews biography