| Born in Lemberg, Austria (now Lvov, Ukraine), Richard von Mises was a mathematician and aerodynamicist who made many contributions to statistics and probability theory. Throughout a long academic career he was a professor at the University of Strasbourg (1909-1918), University of Berlin (1918-1933), University of Istanbul (1933-1939), and Harvard University (1939-1953). In his early work, he advanced boundary-layer flow theory and airfoil design. During World War I, he actually built and piloted an airplane for the Austrian army. However, he also worked in other areas. During his tenure at Strasbourg, for example, he studied the elastic stability in submarine shells under combined stresses. By 1913, in an approach similar to that used previously by M.T. Huber, von Mises independently advanced J.C. Maxwell's abandoned idea that the strength of a material was related to the strain energy of distortion. Commonly known today as the von Mises criterion, the names of Maxwell, Huber, and the experimentalist Hencky are sometimes associated with it as well. |  |
From "Failure Prediction and Avoidance," Experimental Stress Analysis Notebook, Issue 22, Dec. 1993, Measurements Group, p. 10.