Karl Menger's Vienna Colloquium (1928-36)

Left: Karl Menger in the late 1920s. Right: Cover ‘Ergebnisse Eines Mathematischen Kolloquiums’, the proceedings of Karl Menger’s Vienna Colloquium (1931). Photo: from Leonard (1998)

In the history of mathematics and economics, Karl Menger (1902-85) is a fairly anonymous figure. This, perhaps, for a few reasons. Although he was a prodigy, Karl was also the son of another great mind, Carl Menger (1840-1921). Carl (the father) is considered the founder of Austrian Economics. Their names are, as you can imagine, often a point of confusion. Although Karl (the son) made contributions to the algebra of geometries, curve and dimension theory, game theory and graph theory, his most lasting contribution to science might just be the Colloquium he arranged in Vienna in the period 1928-36. This is where Gödel first announced his incompleteness theorem, where von Neumann first presented his purely topological proof of the existence of general competitive equilibria and where game theory began to gr…