The applied mathematician Richard von Mises (1883-1953) and his relations to Russia

The talk is going to look at Richard von Mises’ relations and personal contacts on various levels to Russian physicists and mathematicians. Many Russians were impressed by von Mises’ initiatives for applied mathematics in Berlin from 1920. Others followed critically his axiomatics of probability based on the notion of relative frequency of the occurrence of events. Political mistrust against von Mises’ philosophical positivism was also involved. Several books by von Mises were translated into Russian, often without his knowledge or acceptance. An article on probability in Matematicheskij Sbornik (1934), published both in French and in Russian and titled “On the problem of the two races,” has to be partly interpreted as a satirical reaction to Nazi racism. The most important contact persons in Russia were von Mises’ friend, the physicist Leonid Mandelshtam, and his much younger competitor Andrei Kolmogorov, who in his German book on the foundational notions of probability (1933) acknowledged many merits of von Mises’ approach. *) The entrance is the same