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( Otto Neurath)
Otto Neurath (born December 10, 1882 in Vienna, died December 22, 1945 in Oxford) was an Austrian philosopher of science, sociologist, and political economist. Before he was forced to flee his native country for Great Britain in the wake of the Nazi occupation, Neurath was one of the leading figures of the Vienna Circle. Neurath studied mathematics in Vienna and gained his D.Phil in Berlin. He married Anna Schapire in 1907. She died as a result of childbirth in 1911, and he married a close friend, the mathematician and philosopher Olga Hahn-Neurath. Perhaps because of Olga's blindness and then because of the outbreak of war, his son, the sociologist Paul Neurath was sent to a children's home outside Vienna, where Neurath's mother lived, and returned to live with his father and Olga when he was 9 years old. Since Neurath had written about a moneyless "economy in kind" (or barter system) before World War I, the Austrian government of the time assigned him to the planning ministry during the war. After the war, the Marxist governments of Bavaria and Saxony employed him to help socialize their economies, projects he undertook with enthusiasm. When the central German government suppressed these postwar Marxist insurrections, Neurath was arrested and charged with treason, but was released when it became evident that he had no involvement in politics. Returning to Vienna, he began working on a project that evolved into the "Social and Economic Museum," intended to convey complicated social and economic facts to a largely uneducated Viennese public. This led him to work on graphic design and visual education. With the illustrator Gerd Arntz and with Marie Reidemeister (who later married him and became Marie Neurath), Neurath created Isotype, a striking symbolic way of representing quantitative information via easily interpretable icons. This was also a visual system for displaying quantitative information of the sort later advocated by Edward Tufte. (Related ideas can be found in the work of Buckminster Fuller and Howard T. Odum.) Neurath and his colleagues designed proportional symbols to represent demographic and social statistics in different countries, and to illustrate changes in these statistics over the 19th and early 20th centuries, so as to help the nonliterate or nonspecialist understand social change and inequity. This work has had a strong influence on cartography and graphic design. His innovative work in museums and his concept of the 'transformer' who turned data and statistics into a visual form, Marie Reidemeister's role, has had an influence in museum and exhibition practice.
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