Short answers, pulled from the story.
Friedrich August von Hayek was born on the 8th of May 1899 in Vienna to a family that valued scholarship. His father worked as a medical doctor for the municipal ministry of health and taught botany part-time at the University of Vienna.
World War I served as the decisive influence on his life because it drew attention to the problems of political organization. In 1917, Hayek joined an artillery regiment in the Austro-Hungarian Army and fought on the Italian front before deciding to pursue an academic career to help avoid global catastrophes.
Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom while concerned about the view in British academia that fascism was merely a capitalist reaction to socialism. He argued instead that fascism, Nazism, and state-socialism shared common roots in central economic planning and empowering the state over the individual.
Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics alongside Friedrich Hayek on the 9th of October 1974. The committee cited his warning of a major economic crisis before the great crash came in autumn 1929.
Friedrich Hayek argued that free price systems function as spontaneous orders rather than conscious inventions designed by humans. Price signals enable economic decision makers to communicate tacit knowledge dispersed across society to solve complex problems without central direction.