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Interview

Karl Sigmund

Karl Sigmund is an emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of Vienna. He has made major contributions to evolutionary game theory and to the history of the Vienna Circle, who met regularly in Vienna from 1924-1936. Katharine Mullen talks with him about mathematics, and about the Vienna Circle.

On the walk to interview Sigmund at one of Vienna’s storied coffee houses, I crossed in front of the Secession Building, an architectural marvel built in 1898 to house modern art. The facade is inscribed: “To every age its art, to art its freedom.” Sigmund’s book The Waltz of Reason could have a similar motto: “To every age its mathematics, to mathematics its freedom.”

The Waltz of Reason (Basic Books, 2023) surveys two millennia of the interplay between mathematics and philosophy. Every age, from the ancient Greeks to the present day, has asked philosophical questions regarding what mathematics means and what it can show us.

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