Cäcilie Merry

Cäcilie Fröhlich (born November 21, 1900 in Cologne , † November 9, 1992 in Forest Grove, Oregon ), was a German electrical engineer and mathematician . As a Jew, she had to emigrate from Germany in 1937 and found a new beginning in life in the USA and a job as a university lecturer for electrical engineering .

resume

Cäcilie Fröhlich was born in 1900 into a Jewish family. Her father was a civil engineer . In 1919 she graduated from high school and then studied from the summer semester of 1920 at the universities of Berlin , Cologne and Bonn . In Bonn, she did her doctorate in mathematics in 1925 with Hans Beck (1876–1942) on the subject of conformal transformations in three-dimensional space and passed the state examination for teachers in mathematics and physics.

She taught for a short time (1925/26) at a secondary school for girls in Wiesdorf . With financial support from her father, she did research work for companies and gave courses in mathematics at the Society for Technical and Scientific Further Education and the Working Group of German Industrial Engineers in Cologne.

At the beginning of 1929 she joined the AEG machine factory in Berlin-Wedding (Brunnenstrasse), where she worked as a scientific and technical assistant. In May 1933 she became an adviser to the board. As a result of the racial persecution by the National Socialists , Cäcilie Fröhlich had to leave the company. On this occasion, her superiors, in addition to a wide range of mathematical knowledge, certified her deep insight into technical problems. Their ideas were also incorporated into patents , among other things . Finally she left Germany in 1937 and initially worked in Belgium for ACEC , one of the largest electrical engineering companies. In January 1941 she fled to the USA via France and Portugal . There she was not allowed to take a job in industry, so she began to work at the Department of Electrical Engineering of the City College of New York , first as a lecturer, then as an assistant professor and as an associate professor and finally, from 1950 as a full professor . She was the first (female) professor at this institution. From 1953 to 1957 she was chairman of the department.

In the course of her work she had dealt with a wide range of topics in the field of electrical engineering and mechanics : Foucault currents , switching processes , rectifiers , mechanical vibrations , gyroscopic processes, etc. a. In 1932 she published a thesis on the mathematical modeling and calculation of eddy current losses in press plates and support rings of electrical machines, which received international attention.

Fröhlich kept in close contact with industry. She was a consultant for the Federal Telecommunication Labs in Nutley , New Jersey , from 1950 to 1952 . After her retirement in 1965 she took over the chairmanship of the math department at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon. She held this position until 1969.

In February 2015, in the Berlin district of Marzahn , a street in a completely new industrial area ( Clean Tech Business Park ) was named Cäcilie-Fröhlich-Straße.

Fonts

• Cäcilie Fröhlich: The conformal transformations in three-dimensional space. Dissertation. University of Bonn, printed by Greifswald, 1925.

• Cäcilie Fröhlich: Eddy current losses in massive wrought iron plates and rings. Archiv für Elektrotechnik 26 (5) 1932. S. 321–329. doi : 10.1007 / BF01655792

literature

• Kurt Jäger, Friedrich Heilbronner (Hrsg.): Lexicon of electrical engineers. 2nd edition Berlin. VDE publ. 2010. pp. 148-149.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} BVV decision of the Berlin district of Marzahn-Hellersdorf of February 25, 2015; Press release on the personal biographies of the new street names.
2. ↑ Dissertation as a book representation , accessed on March 25, 2018.