The amazing Bertalanffy

   Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901 - 1972).

He was born and grew up in the little village of Atzgersdorf (now Liesing) near Vienna in Austria on September 19, 1901, and died at the age of 70 years old one day of June 12, 1972 in Bufalo, New York, in the United States. He was a biologist and philosofer known as one of the founders of general systems theory (GST). Bertalanffy proposed that the laws of thermodynamics applied to closed systems, but not necessarily to "open systems," such as living things. His mathematical model of an organism's growth over time, published in 1934, is still in use today.

After Von Bertalanffy worked in Austria, he go, subsequently, to Vienna, London, Canada and the USA.

The Bertalanffy family had roots in the 16th century nobility of Hungary which included several scholars and court officials. His grandfather Charles Joseph von Bertalanffy (1833–1912) had settled in Austria and was a state theatre director in Klagenfurt, Graz, and Vienna, which were important positions in imperial Austria. Ludwig's father, Gustav von Bertalanffy (1861–1919), was a prominent railway administrator. On his mother's side Ludwig's grandfather Joseph Vogel was an imperial counsellor and a wealthy Vienna publisher. Ludwig's mother Charlotte Vogel was seventeen when she married the thirty-four year old Gustav. They divorced when Ludwig was ten, and both remarried outside the Catholic Church in civil ceremonies.

Ludwig von Bertalanffy grew up as an only child educated at home by private tutors until he was ten. His neighbour, the famous biologist Paul Kammerer, became a mentor and an example to the young Ludwig. In 1918 he started his studies at the university level with the philosophy and art history, first at the University of Innsbruck and then at the University of Vienna. Ultimately, Bertalanffy had to make a choice between studying philosophy of science and biology, and chose the latter because, according to him, one could always become a philosopher later, but not a biologist. In 1926 he finished his PhD thesis (translated title: Fechner and the problem of integration of higher order) on the physicist and philosopher Gustav Theodor Fechner.

 

Von Bertalanffy met his future wife Maria in April 1924 in the Austrian Alps, and were almost never apart for the next forty-eight years. She wanted to finish studying but never did, instead devoting her life to Bertalanffy's career. Later in Canada she would work both for him and with him in his career, and after his death she compiled two of Bertalanffy's last works. They had one child, who would follow in his father's footsteps by making his profession in the field of cancer research.

Von Bertalanffy was a professor at the University of Vienna (1934 – 1948), University of London (1948 – 1949), University of Montreal (1949), University of Ottawa (1950 – 1954), University of Southern California (1955 – 1958), the Menninger Foundation (1958 – 1960), University of Alberta (1961 – 1968), and State University of New York at Buffalo (SUNY) (1969 – 1972). In 1972, he died from a sudden heart attack.