Hilda Geiringer

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Hilda Geiringer von Mises previously Hilda Pollaczek also Hilda Polatschek (published as Hilda Geiringer or Hilda Pollaczek-Geiringer ); married von Mises; (Born September 28, 1893 in Vienna , Austria-Hungary , † March 22, 1973 in Santa Barbara (California) ) was an Austrian-American mathematician who dealt with elasticity theory and statistics . She was the first private lecturer in Germany for applied mathematics .

family

Geiringer comes from the family of the Hungarian textile manufacturer Ludwig Geiringer and his wife Martha née Wertheimer. Her siblings were Ernst Geiringer, who later received his doctorate, later engineer Peter Geiringer and later musicologist Karl Geiringer (1899–1989).

Life

Before the First World War she was active in the youth movement. B. in the educational experiment of the "Kindergarten Baumgarten". She studied mathematics at the University of Vienna, where she did her doctorate in 1917 under Wilhelm Wirtinger on Fourier series in two variables. She then worked in the editorial department of the “Jahrbuch der progress der Mathematik” under Leon Lichtenstein in 1918/19 , returned briefly to Vienna in 1919 to work as a teacher and adult education center teacher and in 1921 went to Richard von Mises in Berlin as an assistant at the Institute for Applied Mathematics . There she married the statistician Felix Pollaczek in 1921 , who, like her, came from Vienna and did his doctorate in Berlin with Issai Schur . The marriage ended in 1925 (divorce in 1932), and Hilda Geiringer raised their daughter Magda (born 1922) alone. As an assistant to von Mises, she worked in the field of statistics and plasticity theory. In 1928 she completed her habilitation in Berlin and became a private lecturer and senior assistant. She was on the editorial staff of the von Mises-founded magazine for applied mathematics and mechanics . When the National Socialists came to power in 1933, their hopes for an extraordinary professorship that had already been promised ended. As a Jew, she was discharged from the university in 1933 and finally followed Richard von Mises (after a short time at the Institute for Mechanics in Brussels) to Istanbul in 1934 , where he set up a new mathematics institute, where she was a professor (she initially taught in French , later in Turkish). Eventually they both moved on to the USA, partly because the political situation in Turkey was too uncertain for them ( Kemal Ataturk had died in 1938). Von Mises went first, followed by Hilda Geiringer in 1939, after her position in Turkey was not extended. Hilda Geiringer initially taught at Bryn Mawr College . In 1942, while doing clandestine work for the US government, she lectured at Brown University on the geometry of mechanics, the notes of which were widely circulated. In 1943 she married von Mises and became a professor at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts to be closer to Mises at Harvard University . In 1953, after the death of Mises, she published his collected works (as a Research Fellow at Harvard) and his posthumous “Mathematical theory of probability and statistics” (1964) and his “Mathematical theory of compressible fluid flow” (1958). In 1959 she withdrew from teaching at Wheaton College after she had been appointed associate professor emeritus with full retirement salary at the Free University of Berlin in 1956. In 1951/52 she accompanied Richard von Mises on a trip to Europe and, like him, gave lectures in Vienna and Istanbul (International Congress for Applied Mechanics).

In 1930 she developed the "Geiringer equations" for plane plastic deformation. 1958 appeared in the "Handbuch der Physik" (Ed. Siegfried Flügge ) their overview article on plasticity theory with Alfred M. Freudenthal ("The mathematical theory of the inelastic continuum"). She also studied genetics. In total, she published around 80 scientific papers.

Geiringer was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1955). In 1960 she received an honorary doctorate from Wheaton College. In 1967 the University of Vienna organized a celebration to mark its 50th anniversary as a doctor (golden doctorate). In 2016, Hilda-Geiringer-Gasse in Vienna- Favoriten (10th district) was named after her.

Publications (selection)

literature

  • Christa Binder : Contributions to a biography of Hilda Geiringer. Youth and studies in Vienna . In: Communications of the Society for Applied Mathematics and Mechanics (GAMM-Mitteilungen), Vol. 18 (1995), Issue 1, pp. 61–72, ISSN  0936-7195 .
  • Christa Binder: Hilda Geiringer. Your first years in America . In: Sergei S. Demidow (Ed.): Amphora. Festschrift for Hans Wussing on his 65th birthday . Birkhäuser Verlag, Basel 1992, ISBN 3-7643-2815-0 , pp. 25-53.
  • Alp Eden, Gurol Irzik: German mathematicians in exile in Turkey: Richard von Mises, William Prager, Hilda Geiringer, and their impact on Turkish mathematics, Historia Mathematica, Volume 39, 2012, pp. 432–459
  • Joan L. Richards: Hilda Geiringer . In: Louise S. Grinstein, Paul J. Campbell (Eds.): Women in Mathematics. A bibliographical sourcebook . Greenwood Press, Westport, Conn. 1987, ISBN 0-313-29180-2 , pp. 41-46.
  • Reinhard Siegmund-Schultze: Hilda Geiringer-von Mises, Charlier Series, Ideology, and the Human Side of the Emancipation of Applied Mathematics at the University of Berlin during the 1920s . In: Historia Mathematica , Vol. 20 (1993), pp. 364-381, ISSN  0315-0860 .
  • Reinhard Siegmund-Schultze: Mathematicians fleeing from Nazi Germany , Princeton UP 2009
  • Renate Tobies: Mathematicians in Germany around 1900 in an international comparison , in: Andrea Abele, Helmut Neunzert, Renate Tobies (Eds.), Dream Job Mathematics. Career paths of women and men in mathematics , Springer 2004, especially pp. 145/146 (biography of Geiringer)
  • Margit Wolfsberger: Geiringer-Mises, Hilda , in: Brigitta Keintzel, Ilse Korotin (eds.): Scientists in and from Austria: Life - Work - Work . Böhlau, Vienna 2002, ISBN 3-205-99467-1 , pp. 241–245

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jewish weekly. The truth. Jewish weekly. The truth. XLVIII. Volume, Vienna, June 17, 1932, number 25, p. 7 - Deaths ( Memento from December 28, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 2.3 MB), accessed on April 3, 2013
  2. ↑ She submitted her habilitation thesis ( on the structure of flat frameworks ) as early as 1925. But there were difficulties that u. a. related to the status of applied mathematics at the university. Ludwig Bieberbach assessed her first work very negatively, whereupon she submitted a new work in which he again found errors.
  3. ↑ one of two math professors. In August 1945 she became a US citizen. She was "Head of Department"
  4. ↑ In the years before, several attempts to get a position closer to research at an American university were unsuccessful. According to Richards, this was also due to the discrimination against women.
  5. ↑ Before that she waged a fight for her pension entitlements for years
personal data
SURNAME Geiringer, Hilda
ALTERNATIVE NAMES von Mises, Hilda
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH September 28, 1893
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH March 22, 1973
Place of death Santa Barbara (California)