Curated playlist
University of Vienna alumni
- Gustav MahlerGustav Mahler had to convert to Catholicism to run the Vienna Court Opera. The post was barred to Jewish applicants.
- Lambert SchmithausenScholar Lambert Schmithausen wrote whole studies on whether plants can suffer. He tackled it in Buddhist texts in 1991.
- Rudolf CarnapRudolf Carnap argued that most deep philosophical questions were meaningless.
- Friedrich HayekThree days before the 1929 Wall Street crash, Friedrich Hayek wrote that no sudden collapse was expected.
- Edmund HusserlA Franciscan priest smuggled approximately 40,000 pages of Edmund Husserl's notes out of Nazi Germany.
- Ludwig von MisesNazi troops raided Ludwig von Mises's Vienna apartment and took his papers. He was already in Geneva.
- Hans SuessHans Suess's mail kept getting mixed up with Dr. Seuss's. Both men lived in La Jolla, California.
- Rudolf SimekOne Austrian scholar wrote a book tracing trolls from Norse myth to the internet.
- Joseph SchumpeterJoseph Schumpeter did not coin "creative destruction", the phrase he made famous. He borrowed it from Werner Sombart.
- Huldrych ZwingliTwo smoked sausages shared in a Zurich printer's workshop in 1522 started the Swiss Reformation.
- Alfred AdlerAlfred Adler replaced the analyst's couch with two chairs. He wanted patient and doctor seated more or less as equals.
- Fritjof CapraFritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics was finished one month after a discovery it missed.
- Jakob LaubPhysicist Jakob Laub found Einstein still working at a patent office in 1908. He called it a "stair joke of history."
- Karl PopperSir Karl Raimund Popper was born in Vienna on the 28th of July 1902 and died on the 17th of September 1994. In between, he built a philosophy of science on an odd idea. The strongest theories, he argued, are the ones most exposed to being…
- Kurt GödelIn 1931, Kurt Gödel proved that any sufficiently powerful math system contains true statements it cannot prove.
- Rudolf HilferdingRudolf Hilferding refused to escape Vichy France because he had no identity papers and would not leave illegally.
- Oskar HaleckiHistorian Oskar Halecki argued that Eastern Europe was no less European than Western Europe.