Hilda Geiringer
She received her Ph.D. from the University of Vienna in 1917 under the guidance of Wilhelm Wirtinger with a thesis entitled "Trigonometrische Doppelreihen" about Fourier series in two variables.
She spent the following two years as Leon Lichtenstein's assistant editing the Jahrbuch über die Fortschritte der Mathematik, a mathematics review journal.
In 1921, Geiringer moved to Berlin where she was employed as an assistant to Richard Edler von Mises at the Institute of Applied Mathematics.
Pollaczek obtained his doctorate in 1922 and went on to work for the Reichspost (Postal service) in Berlin, applying mathematical methods to telephone connections.
[a] Following Atatürk’s death in 1938, Geiringer and her daughter went to Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania in the United States, where she was appointed to a lecturer position.
In addition to her lecturing duties at Bryn Mawr College, Geiringer undertook, as part of the war effort, classified work for the United States National Research Council.
During 1942, she gave an advanced summer course in mechanics at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, with the aim of raising the American standards of education to the level that had been attained in Germany.
She wrote up her outstanding series of lectures on the geometrical foundations of mechanics and, although they were never properly published, these were widely disseminated and used in the United States for many years.
To this day, even though Brown University never offered Geiringer permanent employment, the university takes full birthplace credit for these “mimeographed notes.”[3][b] Geiringer and von Mises married in 1943 and, the following year, she left her part-time, low-pay lecturing post at Bryn Mawr College to be nearer to him and because the Wheaton College offered her her first permanent position in the USA.
In a letter dated 7 March 1941, Oswald Veblen, writing in her behalf, stated: "You know of course that there is more and more demand for knowledge of statistics in several sciences.
Boxes 2 and 3 contain manuscripts relating to published items and have numbers referring to the bibliography in HUG 4574.160.” In 1959, Geiringer was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
[7] In 1956, the University of Berlin, perhaps to assuage group guilt, perhaps to add a luminary name to its roster, elected her Professor Emeritus and placed her on full salary.
