Maria-Pia Geppert

Maria-Pia Geppert (born May 28, 1907 in Breslau ; † November 18, 1997 in Tübingen ) was a German biostatistician .

life and work

After graduating from the Ursuline Lyceum in Breslau in 1926, Maria-Pia Geppert studied mathematics and biology at the University of Breslau , as well as in Giessen and Rome . In 1932 she received her doctorate from Guido Hoheisel with a thesis on analytical number theory . In the same year she passed the teaching qualification and was a trainee teacher in Wiesbaden. From 1933 to 1935 she studied actuarial mathematics and statistics in Rome, was assistant to Francesco Cantelli and editor of the Italian actuarial congress in 1934. In 1936 she did her doctorate with Corrado Gini in statistics in Rome.

Geppert was a teacher from 1936 to 1939, from 1939 she worked at the WG Kerckhoff Institute (today Max Planck Institute for Heart and Lung Research ) in Bad Nauheim . From 1940 to 1964 she headed the statistical department of the institute. In 1942 she completed her habilitation at the University of Gießen ( on the comparison of two observed frequencies ) and taught from 1943 at the University of Frankfurt, and from 1947 to 1951 at the TH Darmstadt. From 1951 to 1964 she was Professor of Biostatistics in Frankfurt and from 1964 to 1976 Professor in Tübingen. From 1954 she organized the biometric colloquia , which mostly took place in Bad Nauheim. She founded (with Ottokar Heinisch) in 1958 the Biometric Journal (today Biometrical Journal ) and was co-editor of the journal Metron founded by Gini in 1920 .

Fonts

• Dissertation Breslau: Approximate representations of analytical functions given by Dirichlet series , Math. Zeitschrift 35 , 190–211, 1932
• Dissertation Rome: Una proprieta caratteristica della distribuzione di Bravais , Giorn. Is. Ital. Attuari 7 , 378-391, 1936
• Most plausible estimators true to expectations from triangular trimmed contingency tables , biometrics. Z. 3 , 54-66, 1961

literature

• Rainald K. Bauer: Maria-Pia Geppert 70 years , General Statistical Archive 61 , 209–210, 1977

Web links

• Philipp Ullmann: Maria-Pia Geppert , biography with details of her research 1939-45 (PDF; 133 kB)
• Short biography at DMV (PDF)
• Renate Strohmeier: Lexicon of natural scientists and women of Europe , Harri Deutsch Verlag 1998, online
• Entry in the Mathematics Genealogy Project
• Wolfgang Schwarz, Jürgen Wolfart: On the history of the Mathematical Seminar of the University of Frankfurt am Main from 1914 to 1970 , short biography with photo on p. 76 (PDF; 2.0 MB)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Her mother was Italian. Her maternal grandparents were the sculptor Carl Steinhäuser and the painter Pauline Francke. See Erich Kähler:  Geppert, Harald. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 6, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1964, ISBN 3-428-00187-7 , p. 247 ( digitized version ).
2. ↑ The short biography at DMV instead names Guido Castelnuovo as the doctoral supervisor. We are following the short biography in the contribution Mathematical Statistics by Hermann Witting in A Century of Mathematics, 1890-1990: Festschrift for the anniversary of the DMV , Vieweg, 1990, p. 811.
3. ↑ The department was previously headed by Siegfried Koller . Together with Maria-Pia Geppert's brother Harald Geppert, he wrote the book Erbmathematik , published in 1938. Theory of inheritance in population and clan .
4. ↑ See the contribution Mathematical Statistics by Hermann Witting in A Century of Mathematics, 1890-1990: Festschrift for the anniversary of the DMV , Vieweg, 1990, p. 803.
5. ↑ See also Martin Schumacher: How medical statistics came to Freiburg: a historical perspective , online : “The situation in Germany in the mid-1950s can be characterized briefly in the following way: Through the emigration of numerous scientists abroad, Germany has become one in many areas of science Become a developing country; Mathematical and medical statistics are particularly affected. Essential, fundamental developments take place almost exclusively in the Anglo-Saxon language area. There are some “germ cells” of applied mathematical statistics in Göttingen (Hans Münzner) and Bad Nauheim (Maria-Pia Geppert). A few scientists founded the German Region of the International Biometric Society in 1953 and organized the first biometric colloquium in Bad Nauheim the following year (1954) ”.