20 Facts About Hedwig Kohn

Hedwig Kohn was a physicist who was one of only three women to obtain habilitation in physics in Germany before World War II.

Hedwig Kohn continued her academic career in the United States, where she settled for the rest of her life.

In 1907, Hedwig Kohn enrolled in Breslau University, a year before women were officially allowed to matriculate.

Hedwig Kohn became the second woman to enter the physics department.

Hedwig Kohn obtained her doctorate in physics under Otto Lummer in 1913 and was appointed as Lummer's assistant.

Hedwig Kohn stayed at the university's Physics Institute during World War I, teaching and advising doctoral students in spite of her youth, even receiving a medal for this service after the war.

Hedwig 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.

Hedwig Kohn was dismissed from her position in 1933 due to Nazi regulations which barred Jews from government service.

Hedwig Kohn survived by fulfilling contracts for applied research in the illumination industry until 1938, when she found herself without work or financial resources, and narrowly avoided becoming a victim of the Holocaust.

Hedwig Kohn had been given a visa to the United Kingdom in 1939, but it was cancelled because of World War II; she eventually secured a visa to travel to Sweden and immediately went there in July 1940.

When Hedwig Kohn arrived in the United States in January 1941, she was seriously ill.

Hedwig Kohn started as a lecturer, became an associate professor in 1945, and then was awarded full professorship in 1948.

Hedwig Kohn established a research laboratory for flame spectroscopy while at the college.

Hedwig Kohn was a member of a number of professional associations in the United States, including the American Physical Society, the American Association of Physics Teachers, and Sigma Xi: The Scientific Research Honor Society.

Hedwig Kohn set up a laboratory at Duke University and resumed research, where she guided two graduate students to their doctorates and recruited two post-doctoral fellows to assist in her study of flame spectroscopy.

Hedwig Kohn worked there until very shortly before her death in 1964.

Hedwig Kohn was trained by Otto 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.

Hedwig Kohn further developed such methods and devised ways of extracting information from intensity measurements and from emission line shapes.

Hedwig Kohn 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 2000s.

Hedwig Kohn published a textbook that was used to introduce students to radiometry well into the 1960s.