Otto Neurath

Otto Neurath born on the December 10, 1882 and died on December 22, 1945 was an Austrian philosopher of science, sociologist and political economist. Neurath was one of the leading figures of the Vienna Circle, before he fled his native country in 1934. He was the son of Wilhelm Neurath (1840–1901), a well-known political economist at the time. Otto Neurath studied mathematics in Vienna and gained his Ph.D in the department of Political Science and statistic at the University of Berlin. In 1917 or 1918, he became director of the Deutsches Kriegswirtschaftsmuseum (German Museum of War Economy, later the Deutsches Wirtschaftsmuseum) at Leipzig. To make the museum understandable for everybody, Neurath worked on graphic design and visual education. Neurath then created Isotope artwork with the assistance of illustrator Gerd Arntz and with Maria Reidemeister (whom he would marry in 1941). It was a symbolic way of representing quantitative information via easily interpretable icons. Neurath presented and promoted his communication tools at international conventions of city planners. In one of his later and most important works, Physicalism, Neurath completely transformed the nature of the logical positivist discussion of the program of unifying the sciences.

[Online] Available at: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/neurath/ [Accessed: 5th May 2013]