Otto Neurath (1882–1945)

Otto Neurath was born in Vienna, Austria, a son of Gertrud Kaempffert and Wilhelm Neurath, a Hungarian Jewish political economist and social reformer. He studied mathematics and physics at the University of Vienna in 1902-1903, and then history, philosophy, and economics at the University of Berlin. There he earned a doctoral degree in 1906 for two studies of economic history of antiquity. He wrote textbooks and readers co-authored or co-edited with his first wife Anna Schapire-Neurath. He also wrote publications in logic, including one co-authored with his friend and second wife, Olga Hahn. Together with her brother, mathematician Hans Hahn, and the physicist Philip Frank, Neurath formed a philosophical discussion group in Vienna dedicated to philosophical ideas about science. He taught political economy at the New Vienna Commercial Academy in Vienna until World War I. After the war, he joined the German Social Democratic Party and ran an office for central economic planning in Munich. When the Bavarian Soviet Republic was defeated, Neurath was imprisoned, but allowed to return to Austria after intervention from the Austrian government. While in prison, he wrote Anti-Spengler, a critical attack on Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West. From 1921 until 1934, Neurath participated actively in the development of Vienna’s socialist politics. He also became the driving force behind the Unity of Science movement and the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. In 1923, he founded a new museum for housing and city planning reform, which he named the Gesellschafts-und Wirtschaftsmuseum (Museum of Society and Economy). With the artist-illustrator Gerd Arntz and his assistant Marie Reidemeister (who would marry Neurath in 1941), he developed graphic design and visual education to make the museum more understandable to visitors. The project became a forerunner of today's infographics. Neurath called it ISOTYPE, an acronym for International System of Typographic Picture Education. During the 1934 Austrian Civil War, Neurath moved to The Netherlands to continue his work on an international level. After Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands in World War II, he and Marie fled to England. They spent nine months in an internment camp, then moved to Oxford and resumed working on ISOTYPE and the unity of science until Neurath's death in December 1945.