Abstract
Richard von Mises’ work for ZAMM until his emigration in 1933 and glimpses of the later history of ZAMM
Highlights
In the first part of this work [RS-Mises-2020] I mentioned that RvM followed his own 1920 “Programm” for Zeitschrift für Angewandte Mathematik und Mechanik (ZAMM) with respect to editorial principles, while his introductory article “Tasks and Goals” (Mises 1921) became the authoritative one for the scientific content
I emphasized the international dimension of ZAMM, RvM’s search for the best balance between mathematical-theoretical and experimental contributions, and the subliminal institutional conflict between Berlin and Göttingen
After 1933, no longer involved in ZAMM and in the context of theoretical and practical mechanics flourishing in Germany, RvM published his most important work in the field of probability theory and mathematical statistics during the Turkish emigration and confirmed his position as an international leader in these two fields
Summary
The correspondence between RvM and his friend and competitor Theodor von Kármán usually opened with “Dear Friend.” It was apparently the only Du-relationship RvM had with one of the board members of ZAMM, to whom von Kármán belonged from 1928. It is interesting that RvM does not mention here that his “plasticity condition” (yield criterion) for the transition from the elastic to the plastic state (Mises 1913), which is probably best known and most frequently used today, was largely published as early as 1904 by the Pole Maksymilian Tytus Huber (1872–1950); in Polish and inaccessible to RvM and Hencky This is discussed by Bruhns in his commentary on another work by Hencky in ZAMM from 1924 (Bruhns 2020). “In two fundamental works, ‘Practical methods for solving equations’ (ZAMM 9 (1929), 58–77, 152–164), Mises and his student Hilda Pollaczek-Geiringer (his later wife) gave a well-rounded theory with convergence proof and error estimation for iteration procedures to obtain approximate solutions.” (Collatz 1983, 278). “Chaim Müntz presented [1913] both the power method and the inverse power method for the symmetric and nonsymmetric matrix eigenvalue problem, as well as for the generalized eigenvalue problem with symmetric matrices. . . . In modern textbooks it is known as orthogonal or subspace iteration and can be shown to be equivalent to the basic QR algorithm . . . it was presented in von Mises’s 1929 survey paper [(Mises/Pollaczek-Geiringer 1929), part II], the method is far too tedious for hand computation and was taken up again with the availability of computers in the 1960s.” (Tapia/Dennis/Schäfermeyer 2018, 8/9)
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