Curated playlist
University of Vienna alumni
- Gustav MahlerGustav Mahler was born on the 7th of July 1860 in a village in Bohemia, the second son of a coachman-turned-innkeeper who had clawed his way up from nothing. By the time Mahler died on the 18th of May 1911, he had run the greatest opera…
- Lambert SchmithausenLambert Schmithausen was born on the 17th of November 1939 in Cologne, Germany, and went on to become one of the most methodical voices in Buddhist scholarship. He earned his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Vienna in 1963,…
- Rudolf CarnapRudolf Carnap was born on the 18th of May 1891 in Ronsdorf, in what is now the city of Wuppertal, Germany. At the age of 14, he taught himself Esperanto and attended the World Congress of Esperanto in Dresden in 1908. That detail says…
- Friedrich HayekFriedrich Hayek wrote on the 26th of October 1929, three days before the Wall Street crash, that there was no reason to expect a sudden collapse of the New York stock exchange. Decades later, the Nobel committee would praise him as one of…
- Edmund HusserlEdmund Husserl was born on the 8th of April 1859 in Proßnitz, a small town in the Margraviate of Moravia, the second of four children of a Jewish milliner. He would go on to found phenomenology, one of the most far-reaching philosophical…
- Ludwig von MisesLudwig von Mises was born on the 29th of September 1881 in Lemberg, then the capital of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria inside the Austro-Hungarian Empire. By the time he died on the 10th of October 1973, he had outlasted two world…
- Hans SuessDuring the Second World War, a chemist named Hans Suess advised the production of heavy water at a plant in Norway. Allied commandos would later target that exact facility in Operation Gunnerside. Suess was born on the 16th of December…
- Rudolf SimekRudolf Simek was born on the 21st of February 1954 in Austria, and he would spend the decades that followed mapping the mythological landscape of the medieval Germanic world with a scholar's patience and a writer's range. His books have…
- Joseph SchumpeterJoseph Alois Schumpeter was born on the 8th of February, 1883, in Triesch, a small town in Habsburg Moravia, in what is now the Czech Republic. He died in his home in Taconic, Connecticut, on the night of the 8th of January, 1950. In…
- Huldrych ZwingliHuldrych Zwingli celebrated his first Mass in his hometown of Wildhaus on the 29th of September 1506, a young priest who, by his own admission, had studied little theology. Twenty-five years later he died on a battlefield near Kappel, one…
- Alfred AdlerAlfred Adler was born on the 7th of February 1870 at Mariahilfer Strasse 208 in Rudolfsheim, a village on the western fringes of Vienna. He was the second of seven children. By the time he was three years old, he had slept next to a dying…
- Fritjof CapraFritjof Capra was born in Vienna on the 1st of February 1939. His book The Tao of Physics, published in 1975, proposed that modern physics and Eastern mysticism lead to the same conclusions. Capra would spend decades building an…
- Jakob LaubJakob Johann Laub was born on the 7th of February 1884 in Rzeszów, a city then part of Austria-Hungary, and he died on the 22nd of April 1962 in Fribourg. His name appears in the history of physics not as a soloist, but as a collaborator…
- Kurt GödelKurt Friedrich Gödel, born on the 28th of April 1906 in Brünn, Austria-Hungary, died in Princeton Hospital on the 14th of January 1978, weighing so little that his death certificate listed the cause as "malnutrition and inanition caused by…
- Rudolf HilferdingRudolf Hilferding died in a Paris prison in February 1941, in the Gestapo dungeon of La Santé, after being tortured. He had, a few days earlier, been handed over by the police of Vichy France to the very regime he had spent years…
- Oskar HaleckiOskar Halecki was born in Vienna on the 26th of May 1891, the son of a Polish officer serving in the Austrian Army. His father, Oscar Chalecki-Halecki, rose to the rank of lieutenant field-marshal. That military pedigree shaped none of the…