Hedwig Kohn was born on April 5th, 1887. She 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. During the Nazi regime, She and the other two physicists, Lise Meitner and Hertha Sponer, were forced to leave Germany. Check out Hedwig Kohn Wiki, Age, Education, Career, Family, Google Doodle, Death, Biography & More.
Hedwig Kohn Wiki/Bio:
| Real Name: | Hedwig Kohn |
| Date of Birth: | 5-April-1887 |
| Age: | 76 Years (At the time of Death) |
| Zodiac Sign: | Aries |
| Birth Place: | Wrocław, Poland |
| Ethnicity: | Jewish |
| Death Date: | 26-Mar-64 |
| Death Place: | Durham, North Carolina, U.S. |
Hedwig Kohn Early life& Education:
In 1933, Hedwig Kohn was dismissed from her position 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. She was finally offered temporary positions at three women’s colleges in the United States through the aid of Rudolf Ladenburg (1882–1952), Lise Meitner, Hertha Sponer, the American Association of University Women (AAUW), and many others. She obtained a visa and left Germany in July 1940.
Hedwig Kohn Career:
Hedwig Kohn was given a UK visa in 1939, it was however immediately canceled due to the war. She got a visa to go to Sweden in 1940 where she stayed for a while before obtaining a US visa and moved there permanently.
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.
Lummer trained Kohn 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.
Hedwig Kohn After Retirement:
After her retirement in the late 1940s, Kohn joined the staff of the Physics Department of Duke University in Durham, where she directed the research of several graduate students and research associates. She was the author of numerous publications on flame photometry and optical spectroscopy. She was a member of die American Physical Society, die American Association of Physics Teachers, and Sigma Xi.
Hedwig Kohn Google Doodle:
On April 5th, 2019, Hamburg-based guest artist Carolin Löbbert designed a Google Doodle to celebrate the life of the pioneering physicist, Hedwig Kohn’s 132nd birthday anniversary.
Hedwig Kohn Death:
Hedwig Kohn died on November 26th, 1964, at the age of 77 in Durham, N.C. No cause of Death is on record. She had lived and worked in Durham since her retirement in 1952.
