Friedrich Maria Urban


Friedrich Maria Urban was an Austrian-Czech psychologist, known for the introduction of probability weightings used in experimental psychology.

Biography

Friedrich Johann Victor Urban was born on 28 December 1878 into a German-speaking family in Brno, Moravia, Austria-Hungary. He adopted the name "Friedrich Maria" as a pen name and his published articles appear under the name "F. M. Urban". He was a gymnasium graduate in Brno in 1897 and received his Promotion in philosophy from the University of Vienna in 1902. He did research and studied probability under Wilhelm Wirth in Leipzig. He taught psychological acoustics at Harvard University from February 1904 to November 1905. He was a Fellow for Research in Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania from 1905 to 1908.
In 1914 Urban returned to Brno and married Adele Königsgarten, who was Jewish. At the outbreak of World War I, he and his wife moved to Sweden, where he did research from 1914 to 1917 at the Swedish Academy of Sciences. In 1917 he returned to Brno and served in the Austrian army. Brno was transferred to the sovereignty of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1919. Because his fluency in Czech was inadequate for an academic post, from 1919 he worked as a statistician for an insurance company, but continued to publish papers on psychometry and psychophysics. Urban and his Jewish wife stayed in Brno throughout World War II, although they sent their two daughters abroad. At the end of World War II, he was put into a concentration camp by the Soviet Red Army and then by the Soviet-controlled Czechoslovak regime. He was released owing to pleas from foreign colleagues, but he was forced in 1948 to leave Czechoslovakia. He and his wife joined their elder daughter in Norway and then lived in Brazil from 1949 to 1952 where he lectured at the University of São Paulo on factor analysis. In 1952 Urban and his wife went to live with their younger daughter in France, living first in Toulon and then Maisons-Laffitte near Paris.
In 1911 he was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was an Invited Speaker of the ICM in 1928 in Bologna.

Müller-Urban weights

Müller-Urban weights are based on techniques introduced by G. E. Müller in 1904 and by F. M. Urban in 1912.
Contemporary psychologists have replaced Müller-Urban weights with newer statistical procedures.

Selected publications