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Richard von Mises and the German Academy of Science in Berlin. (Richard von Mises und die Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin.) (German) Zbl 1113.01015

Hykšová, Magdalena (ed.) et al., Wanderings through mathematics. Meeting on the history of mathematics, Rummelsberg near Nürnberg, Germany, May 4–8, 2005. Proceedings. Augsburg: ERV Dr. Erwin Rauner Verlag (ISBN 3-936905-15-0). Algorismus 53, 20-27 (2006).
The paper is much wider than its title. Drawing on archival sources, the author describes how both von Mises and von Neumann were elected in 1950 Corresponding Members of the Deutsche Akademic der Wissenschaften (German Democratic Republic, DDR) and how both of them declined solely because of the McCarthy era then existing in the USA.
Three members of the Academy urged its president to elect von Mises as a specialist in applied mathematics and one of them (Georg Hamel) also compiled a highly favourable report of Mises’ scientific achievements including (as Mises would have agreed with) the theory of probability under applied mathematics. (The same Hamel published a paper ‘Die Mathematik im Dienste des Dritten Reiches’, Z. Math. Naturwiss. Unterricht 65, 10–15 (1934).)
In 1953, as the author continues, Hamel, who lived in West Germany, broke off his relations with the Academy because its president had upheld the official claim of the DDR that West Germany was becoming a threat to France.
The author touches on the Mises theory of probability but does not mention Khinchin’s highly relevant posthumous paper (1961) translated in Science in Context 17, 391–422 (2004). She notes Mises’ principle of abstaining from political activity but forgets about his manuscript of 1934, ‘Die Mathematik and des Dritte Reich’, which I recently published [Mises on mathematics in Nazi Germany, Hist. Sci. (2) 13, 134–146 (2003)].
For the entire collection see [Zbl 1102.01001].

MSC:

01A60 History of mathematics in the 20th century

Biographic References:

von Mises, Richard; von Neumann, John
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