Having studied machine engineering at the Technical U of Vienna (gaining his PhD in 1907), von Mises was appointed Professor of Applied Mathematics at U Strasbourg in 1909. During the First World War he was a pilot, designing and building his own plane. After the war he gave the first university course on the mechanics of powered flight. He was appointed Director of the Institute of Applied Mathematics in Berlin in 1920. However, in 1933, he left Hitler's Germany for Turkey. At the outbreak of the Second World War he moved to the USA, joining the faculty first at MIT and then, in 1943, at Harvard U.

http://www.math.uah.edu/stat/biographies/VonMises.html Fuller biography and photograph.