Hedwig Kohn

Hedwig Kohn ( born April 5, 1887 in Breslau, † 1964 in the U.S.) was a German physicist. She was one next to Lise Meitner and Hertha Sponer to the only three women who achieved a habilitation in physics before the Second World War in Germany. As Meitner and Sponer she had the time of National Socialism in Germany to flee and was a professor of physics in the United States.

Life

Hedwig Kohn came from a little religious Jewish family. She was the daughter of Helene Hancke and Georg Kohn, the textile merchant in Breslau.

In 1906 she entered the University of Breslau to study, initially as an auditor, as an official enrollment of women at this time was not yet possible. She received her PhD in 1913 with the paper "On the nature of the emission of the luminous flame in metal vapors ." In 1914 she became an assistant at the Physics Institute of the University of Breslau, where she took over the extensive tasks than most of her male colleagues were called to the army at the beginning of the First World War. With Otto Lummer, she worked on a new edition of " Müller- Pouillets textbook of physics." Her extensive contributions to this project were recognized her in 1930 as a habilitation. A little later she became a lecturer.

In 1933 it was announced that all Jewish Wisschenschaftlerinnen and scientists from the University should be dismissed. The Director of the Physics Institute, Clemens Schaefer, tried on 22 June 1933 a letter to the university administration to prevent Hedwig Kohn's dismissal, but was unsuccessful. On September 7, 1933, she was deprived of his teaching license. Kohn emigrated to Switzerland, where she worked in Arosa and as an industry consultant at the light climate tables Observatory. In 1938 it secured the Women's College of the University of North Carolina, the Sweet Briar College in Virginia and the Wellesley College to teaching for one year each, which allowed her to enter the United States. At Wellesley College, she was an assistant professor in 1945 and three years later a full professor. In 1952 she went to Durham University in North Carolina, at that time also Hertha Sponer worked. As Hedwig Kohn 65 years retired, Sponer enabled her to collaborate on a research project at Duke University, where she did research for a further 12 years and taught.

Her specialty was the look, they also worked on the method of pyrometry and spectrometry and the development of light sources.