Name Hedwig Kohn Role Physicist | Died 1964 | |
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Hedwig Kohn physicist Google Doodle
Hedwig Kohn (April 5, 1887 – 1964), was a pioneer in physics and one of only three women who obtained Habilitation (the qualification for university teaching in Germany) in physics before World War II. She and the other two physicists, Lise Meitner and Hertha Sponer, were forced to leave Germany during the Nazi regime.
Contents
- Hedwig Kohn physicist Google Doodle
- Early life
- Escape from Germany
- Life in America
- Contributions to science
- References
Early life
Born in Breslau, Province of Silesia, Kohn was the daughter of Georg Kohn (1850–1932), a wholesale merchant of fine cloth, and Helene Hancke (1859–1926), a member of a well-to-do Breslau family. Hedwig entered the university in Breslau in 1907. She obtained her doctorate in physics under Otto Lummer in 1913, and was soon appointed as Lummer's assistant. She stayed at the university's Physics Institute during World War I, and obtained her Habilitation in 1930.
Escape from Germany
Kohn was dismissed from her position in 1933, due to Nazi regulations which barred Jews from government service. She survived by fulfilling contracts for applied research in the illumination industry until 1938, when she found herself without work or financial resources and came very close to being a victim of the Holocaust. Finally, she was offered temporary positions at three women's colleges in the United States through the aid of Rudolf Ladenburg, Lise Meitner, Hertha Sponer, the American Association of University Women (AAUW), and many others. She obtained a visa and left Germany in July 1940.
Life in America
The journey to her first position, at the Women's College of the University of North Carolina in Greensboro, took Kohn through Berlin, Stockholm, Leningrad, Moscow, Vladivostok, Yokohama, San Francisco, and Chicago. She taught at the Women's College of the University of North Carolina for a year and a half. In 1942, she began teaching at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. She retired in 1952 as a professor. Upon her retirement, Hertha Sponer, then professor of physics at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, offered her a position as a research associate. Kohn set up a laboratory at Duke and resumed research, guiding two graduate students to their doctorates and recruiting two post-doctoral fellows. She worked there until very shortly before her death, in 1964.
Contributions to science
Kohn was trained by Lummer in the quantitative determination of the intensity of light, both from broad-band sources, such as a "black body", and from the discrete emission lines of atoms and molecules. She further developed such methods and devised ways of extracting information from intensity measurements and from emission line shapes. She wrote 270 pages in the leading physics text of the 1930s and 1940s in Germany, received one patent, and wrote numerous articles in scientific journals, some of which were still being cited into the 1980s. Two of her students became professors in Germany.