The Story of
Hilda Geiringer
Hilda Geiringer was the first woman to teach mathematics at a German University, and yet it was in 2019 when BBC recognized her as the “Missed Genius” who “reshaped maths” did most of us place her in the league of the extraordinary academicians.
Source: BBC
Hilda Geiringer was the first woman to teach mathematics at a German University, and yet it was in 2019 when BBC recognized her as the “Missed Genius” who “reshaped maths” did most of us place her in the league of the extraordinary academicians. She bore the double brunt of gender and race and fled a Nazi Europe to later become the head of the mathematics department at Wheaton College, Massachusetts.
Dr. Geiringer was a part of an early vanguard in 20th Century applied mathematics. Hilda made great contributions to the mathematical theories of plasticity and probability genetics and lay the fundamental groundwork which many parts of applied sciences and engineering rely upon today.
A brilliant student with a phenomenal memory, she studied mathematics and physics at the University of Vienna and received her Ph.D. in 1917 with a ground-breaking thesis on the Fourier series in two variables, called "Trigonometrische Doppelreihen” or “Trigonometric Double Rows”.
In 1933, when she was due to be promoted to associate professor, a position held by very selective women in 20th Century Germany, she was fired as an aftermath of Nazi anti-Jewish legislation. She then went to Istanbul University in Turkey, where she worked as an assistant and published 18 papers and a book in Turkish to help chemistry students understand introductory calculus.
For six years, she sought escape from the Nazi threat in Europe, and finally arrived in the USA, where, in addition to lecturing at Bryn Mawr College, she worked as a research fellow in mathematics at Harvard. In the new country, she struggled for years to reclaim her status in academia. This, however, was not due to a lack of skill or talent. Mathematics was crucial to war-related research and funding for the field grew dramatically in the era of World War II.
Source: Wheaton College, Massachusetts
Source: Bryn Mawr College
Despite her obvious skill and the growing demand in her field of expertise, her gender disqualified her for many jobs at a time when many of her male contemporaries found work easily. As Alma Steingart, a historian of applied mathematics at Columbia University says, “Mathematics is one of the worst fields in terms of women’s participation.”
In a response to Geiringer’s inquiries for employment at Tufts College near Boston wrote: “...it is not merely prejudice against women, yet it is partly that, for we do not want to bring in more if we can get men”. Female professors, as per the universities in the US in the 20th Century, made the courses less marketable.
She was finally employed by Bryn Mawr, a women’s college in Pennsylvania. However, women’s colleges at the time were poorly funded and were no centres of sophisticated research-the likes of which Geirenger practised at other universities in Germany and Turkey.
In the same BBC article on Hilda Geiringer’s life, Leila McNeill writes:
“Ask people to imagine a scientist, and many of us will picture the same thing – a heterosexual white male. Historically, a number of challenges have made it much more difficult for those who don’t fit that stereotype to enter fields like science, math or engineering.
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