Gerhard Tintner

Gerhard Emil Leopold Tintner was born on 29 September 1907 in Nuremberg, the son of his Austrian parents Leopold and Karoline Tintner. The family was of Jewish descent; the greater part of Tintner's school and university years fell in Vienna, to which his parents returned soon after his birth. At the University of Vienna he studied economics, statistics, and law from the mid-1920s and graduated on 22 December 1930 with a doctorate in law (Dr. iur.). In the Mathematics Genealogy tradition, Ludwig von Mises is named as his doctoral supervisor, which is atypical given the configuration of chairs in Vienna but accords with Tintner's close attachment to the Mises circle. From 1930 to 1936 Tintner worked at the Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research in Vienna, at first under Friedrich August von Hayek and from 1931 under Oskar Morgenstern. Here his first major work, "Prices in the Trade Cycle" (Vienna, 1935), with a preface by Morgenstern, also came into being. In parallel he took part as an additional guest in the Mises private seminar, alongside figures such as Karl Menger junior, Ewald Schams, and Erich Schiff. A Rockefeller fellowship took him from 1934 to 1936 to Harvard, Columbia, Chicago, Stanford, Berkeley, the Institut Henri Poincaré in Paris, and Cambridge. As early as 1930 a short period of study at the London School of Economics had brought him together with Lionel Robbins. In 1936 Tintner emigrated for good to the United States. After a brief year as a research fellow at the Cowles Commission in Colorado Springs, in 1937 he took up an assistant professorship at Iowa State College in Ames, where he remained until 1962, latterly as full professor of economics, mathematics, and statistics. During this period he wrote the textbook "Econometrics" (1952), which codified the young discipline internationally, as well as "Mathematics and Statistics for Economists" (1953). Tintner served as a consultant to the Office of Strategic Services and advised the US Department of Agriculture. After a short move to the University of Pittsburgh, he worked from 1963 to 1973 as Distinguished Professor at the University of Southern California. In 1973 he returned as honorary professor and head of the Institute for Econometrics and Operations Research to the Vienna University of Technology, which he directed until 1978. The scholarly community honoured him with the Golden Medal of Honour for Services to Vienna (1979), the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art, First Class (1982), and an honorary doctorate from Bonn. He died on 13 November 1983 in Vienna.