received Prussian citizenship. His application for a teaching position at the Brno University of Technology was interrupted by the First World War. Before the war he had already become a pilot and lectured on the design of aircraft, and in 1913 at Strasbourg he gave the first university course on powered flight. On the outbreak of war it was natural for him to join the Austro-Hungarian army as a test pilot and a flying instructor. In 1915, he supervised the construction of a 600-horsepower (450 kW) aircraft – the "Mises-Flugzeug" (Mises aircraft) for the Austrian army. It was completed in 1916 but never saw active war service. After the war, von Mises held the new chair of hydrodynamics and aerodynamics at the Dresden Technische Hochschule. In 1919 he was appointed director (and full professor) at the new Institute of Applied Mathematics created at the behest of Erhard Schmidt at the University of Berlin. In 1921 he founded the journal Zeitschrift für Angewandte Mathematik und Mechanik and became its editor. With the rise of the National Socialist Party to power in 1933, Mises felt his position threatened, despite his First World War military service. He moved to Turkey, where he held the newly created chair of pure and applied mathematics at the University of Istanbul. In 1939 he accepted a position in the United States, where in 1944 he was appointed as Gordon McKay Professor of Aerodynamics and Applied Mathematics at Harvard University. In 1943 he married Hilda Geiringer, a mathematician who had been his assistant at the Institute and moved with her to Turkey and then to the U.S. In 1950, von Mises declined an offer of honorary membership from the Communist-dominated East German Academy of Science. Contributions In aerodynamics, von Mises made notable advances in boundary-layer flow theory and airfoil design. He developed the distortion energy theory of stress, which is one of the most important concepts used by engineers in material strength calculations. His ideas were not unanimously well received, although Alexander Ostrowski had said of him: "Only with the appointment of Richard von Mises to the University of Berlin did the first serious German school of applied mathematics with a broad sphere of influence come into existence. Von Mises was an incredibly dynamic person and at the same time amazingly versatile like Runge. He was especially well versed in the realm of technology." and also wrote "Because