Franz Leopold Alt (November 30, 1910 – July 21, 2011) was an Austrian-born American mathematician who made major contributions to computer science in its early days.
[Afterword, Karl Menger, Ergebnisse eines Mathematischen Kolloquiums, Springer-Verlag/Wien, 1998] Alt engaged in research in set-theoretic topology and logical foundations of geometry.
In 1936, Alt developed an axiomatic foundation for economic concepts, described in "Ueber die Messbarkeit des Nutzens," which he presented at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Oslo (published in Zeitschrift für Nationalökonomie, VII/2, 1936; in German).
Alt left Austria at the time of its occupation by Nazi Germany in 1938 and came to New York City with his wife Alice Modern, whom he married just before leaving Vienna.
This involved finding Americans willing to serve as sponsors for immigration visas, and they were successful in helping about 30 adults and children to escape.
He was concerned with the use of mathematical and statistical methods for the study and forecasting of business conditions in the economy as a whole and in a number of industries, commodity and security markets.
When the United States entered World War II, he volunteered for military service but was at first rejected as an alien; he was drafted into the Army in 1943.
This led to the founding of the Association for Computational Linguistics and to the organization of two international meetings jointly with a similar group in Japan, one in Washington, D.C., the other in Tokyo.
He mentioned the "new programming method" for ENIAC and explained that its seemingly small vocabulary was in fact ample; that future computers, then in the design stage, would get along on a dozen instruction types, and this was known to be adequate for expressing all of mathematics ...
This caused some hilarity in the audience, which provoked von Neumann to say: "If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is."
Mathematiker auf der Flucht vor Hitler: Quellen und Studien zur Emigration einer Wissenschaft, (Deutsche Mathematiker-Vereinigung, 1998).
Expanded and translated into English as Mathematicians Fleeing from Nazi Germany: Individual Fates and Global Impact (Princeton University Press, 2009).
At the opening of the exhibition, he spoke of his recollections [3] In May 2007, Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer conferred on Alt the "Ehrenkreuz fuer Wissenschaft und Kunst I. Klasse," the highest distinction for science and art in Austria.
Dr. Walter Schachermayer, then of the Vienna University of Technology, spoke about Alt's paper "On the Measurement of Utility," presented at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Oslo in 1936, and its relation to the work of John von Neumann, Oskar Morgenstern and Kenneth Arrow, and recent developments in the notion of coherent risk measures.