Philipp Frank, Richard von Mises, and the Frank-Mises

摘要

The theoretical physicist Philipp Frank (1884–1966) and the applied mathematician Richard von Mises (1883–1953) both received their university education in Vienna shortly after 1900 and became friends at the latest during the Great War.They were attached to the Vienna Circle of Logical Positivists and wrote an influential two-part work on the differential and integral equations of mechanics and physics, the Frank-Mises, of 1925 and 1927, with its second edition following in 1930 and 1935.This work originated in the lectures that the mathematician Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866) delivered on partial differential equations and their applications to physical questions at the University of G?ttingen between 1854 and 1862, which were edited and published posthumously in1869 by the physicist Karl Hattendorff (1834–1882).The immediate precursor of the Frank-Mises, however, was the extensive revision of Hattendorff’s edition of Riemann’s lectures that the mathematician Heinrich Weber (1842–1913) published in two volumes, the Riemann-Weber, of 1900 and 1901, with its second edition following in 1910 and 1912. I trace this historical lineage, explore the nature and contents of the Frank-Mises, and discuss its complementary relationship to the first volume of the text that the mathematicians Richard Courant (1888–1972) and David Hilbert (1862–1943) published on the methods of mathematical physics in 1924, the Courant-Hilbert,which, when it and its second volume of 1937 were translated into English and extensively revised in 1953 and 1961, eclipsed the classic Frank-Mises.