Olaf Helmer

Olaf Helmer-Hirschberg (born June 4, 1910 in Berlin ; † April 14, 2011 ) was a German-American mathematician and futurologist .

Life and activity

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After attending school, Helmer studied mathematics at the Friedrich-Wilhelms University in Berlin. In 1934 he received his doctorate with a thesis supervised by Hans Reichenbach. In the same year he moved to Great Britain, where he obtained a second doctorate with a thesis by Susan Stebbing at the University of London . This dealt with Russell's paradox. Bertrand Russell himself was one of its examiners.

In 1937 Helmer went to Great Britain, where he initially received as a research assistant from Rudolf Carnap at the University of Chicago. He then earned his living as a lecturer in mathematical logic at the University of Illinois (1938-1941) at the New School for Social Research and at the City College of New York. During the Second World War he worked for the Applied Mathematics Panel in New York.

In Germany, at the end of the 1930s, because of his work, Helmer was targeted by the National Socialist police, who classified him as an important target: In the spring of 1940, the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin put him on the special wanted list GB , a directory of people who would be killed in the event of an invasion and occupation of the British Isles should be located and arrested by the Wehrmacht by the occupation troops following special commandos of the SS with special priority.

From 1944 Helmer worked for the National Defense Research Council under John Williams. In 1946 he followed Williams to the that year founded RAND Corporation , a think tank that dealt primarily with military issues, in which Williams took over the management of the mathematics department. Helmer's work for RAND lasted until 1968. At Helmer's instigation, Williams convinced Frank Collbohn to expand RAND by two departments (one dealing with economic issues and one dealing with social science issues). The idea behind this initiative was that the think tank's original research would be too narrow, since solving military problems that would be important to the national security of the United States is unlikely to always rely solely, or best, on mathematical, engineering or physical methods out of the world (or treated), but in many cases economics or political science approaches would provide the most effective means of finding an answer to the problems in question.

From a methodological point of view, Helmer's work at the RAND Corporation was of lasting importance, since during his time there he and Norman Dalkey played a leading role in the development of the so-called Delphi method (also Delphi technique or Delphi forecasting), an instrument for Formulation of prognostic statements about the future, contributed: Specifically, he made contributions to the development of this process technology by having experts in six major areas (scientific development, population growth, automation, space travel, war and peace, weapon systems) submit questionnaires in four rounds - one of which Exchanges between experts were systematically avoided - in order to arrive at a prognosis that would come as close as possible to the reality that will actually occur later by accumulating well-founded assumptions by experts regarding the question of what developments and conditions will occur in the future: underlie de The idea was that if a quantitatively high number of expert opinions on future developments and conditions converge to a large extent in their views and results, as a result of this condition it can be assumed that the converging assumptions made regarding the future, as they are likely to look like the future as it will actually unfold will in all probability come very close.

In 1968, Helmer founded the Institute of Future with Theodore Gordon , Paul Baron and Arnold Kramish , and he headed its branch on the US east coast in Middletown, Connecticut, for several years. In 1973 he was appointed Professor of Futuristics at the Center for Future Research at the University of Southern California's School of Business Administration. In 1976 he retired. He then worked for a year as a researcher at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis near Vienna. He then retired to Carmel, California, but continued to travel extensively and continue to be a lecturer and consultant. In later years he lived in Montecito .

Helmer was married to Helen Mary.

Fonts

• The Elementary Divisor Theorem for Certain Rings without Chain Conditions. in: Bulletin of American Mathematic Society , Vol. 49 (1943), pp. 225-236.
• A Syntactical Definition of Probability and of Degree of Confirmation. in: Journal of Symbolic Logic , Vol. 10 (1945), pp. 25-60.
• Analytic Geometry , 1947. (with David Salomon Nathan)
• A problem in logistics. The Jeep Problem , 1947 (together with the Douglas Aircraft Company)
• On the Epistemology of the Inexact Sciences , 1960. (with Nicholas Reschner)
• The Delphi Method for Systematizing Judgments About the Future , 1966.
• The Use of the Delphi Technique in Problems of Educational Innovations , 1966.
• 50 years of the future: report on e. Long-term forecast fd world d. next 5 decades , 1966.
• Propsects of Technological Progress , 1967.
• Some Potential Developments, 1970-2000 , 1970. (with Raul De Brigard)
• On the Future State of the Union , 1972.
• California Futures Study: Analysis of Impacts for Transportation Planning , 1974 (with Paul Gray)
• Looking forward. A Guide to Futures Research , 1983.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Entry on Helmer on the special wanted list GB (reproduced on the website of the Imperial War Museum in London) .