Judita Cofman

Judita Cofman (born June 4, 1936 in Vršac , Serbia ; † December 19, 2001 in Debrecen , Hungary ) was a Serbian-German mathematician and university professor. She was the first mathematician to graduate from Novi Sad University . Cofman was known for her research in finite geometry and for her books for young mathematicians.

life and work

Cofman was born in what was then Yugoslavia and today's Serbia as the daughter of an ethnically German, but Hungarian-speaking family whose family brewery, founded in 1859, was closed by the occupying Germans during World War II and nationalized in 1946 by the newly established communist government of Yugoslavia. She grew up in Vršac and learned Hungarian, Serbian, German, Russian, English and later French and Italian. From 1954 to 1958 she studied mathematics at the Philosophical Faculty in Novi Sad. Then she taught as a math teacher in Zrenjanin . In 1960 she returned to the newly founded university in Novi Sad as an assistant to the mathematician Mileva Prvanović . In 1961 she worked with Lucio Lombardo-Radice in Rome . In 1963 she received her doctorate under Mileva Prvanović as the first female mathematician at the University of Novi Sad. After completing her doctorate, she did research as a Humboldt fellow at the Goethe University in Frankfurt . In 1965 she became a lecturer at Imperial College London and was visiting professor at the University of Perugia . In 1971 she completed her habilitation at the University of Tübingen and then worked there as a private lecturer and professor. In 1976 she went to the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz , where Albrecht Beutelspacher did his doctorate with her. During this phase of her career, she changed her research interests from finite geometries to teaching math. From 1978 to 1993 she was a math teacher at Putney High School in London, and it was during those years that she began publishing articles on math teaching. In 1993 she returned to the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg as Professor of Mathematics and Head of the Department of Teaching Methods in Mathematics . In 2001 she was appointed professor at the Institute for Postgraduate Studies of Teaching Methods in Mathematics at the Faculty of Natural Sciences Kossuth Lajos University in Debrecen , Hungary . She died a few months after taking up this job.

Books (selection)

Problems for Young Mathematicians, Pullen, 1981, ISBN 0907616062
What to Solve ?: Problems and Suggestions for Young Mathematicians, Clarendon Press, 1990
Numbers and Shapes Revisited: More Problems for Young Mathematicians, Clarendon Press, 1995, ISBN 978-0198534600
Insights into the history of mathematics, 2 volumes, spectrum, 1999 and 2001, ISBN 978-3827410870

literature

Nikolic Aleksandar: The work of Judita Cofman on didactics of mathematics . In: Inovacije u nastavi 27, pp. 105–113, 2014

Web links

personal data
SURNAME	Cofman, Judita
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	Serbian-German mathematician and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH	June 4, 1936
PLACE OF BIRTH	Vršac , Serbia
DATE OF DEATH	December 19, 2001
Place of death	Debrecen , Hungary