Results of a mathematical colloquium (Q4207993)

The articles of this volume will not be indexed individually. The book collects documents of a vivid mathematical community of the 1930s, gathered around the young Karl Menger (1902-1985) at Vienna. A survey, both biographical and mathematical, is contributed by K. Sigmund. Menger had kept records of his seminar, beginning with a talk by himself on dimension theory (1928) and finishing with a paper by von Neumann on economic equilibrium and fixed point theorems (1936). The main parts of the book are the reprints of these records in the German original (Zbl 0003.41402, Zbl 0003.41403, Zbl 0004.26603), and an English translation of an article by Menger, stating his own ideas of the Colloquium, and focussing on coordinate-free and set theoretical geometry. Contributors to such topics included E. Čech, N. Aronszajn, L. M. Blumenthal and Viennese professors and students, among them F. Alt, G. Nöbeling, A. Wald. Ryszard Engelking summarizes topology in the seminar. As Gérard Debreu says in his foreword, the colloquium had a long lasting influence on economic theory. The seminar brought to light early approaches to mathematical economics (Karl Schlesinger, Abraham Wald, J. von Neumann). Wald's results and subsequent developments are sketched by Werner Hildenbrand. John W. Dawson jun. describes logical contributions (Tarski, Gödel) and their influences. The original reports vary in size and depth. The more influential of the contributions were also published elsewhere. The historical value of the book is that it shows some of the genesis of several fields of 20th century mathematics.