Judita Cofman (1936–2001) was a Yugoslav-German mathematician, the first person to earn a doctorate in mathematics at the University of Novi Sad.
Her father was a brewer, but the family brewery (founded in 1859) was closed by the occupying Germans in World War II and then nationalized by the newly-established communist government of Yugoslavia in 1946.
[1][2] Growing up in Vršac, Cofman learned Hungarian, Serbian, German, Russian, English, and later French and Italian; her facility with languages became useful for her mathematics studies.
[1][2] In the mid-1970s she moved to Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, at a time when her interests began to shift as well, from finite geometry to mathematics education.
She retired from Erlangen and moved to the University of Debrecen, in Hungary, in 2001, but died on 19 December 2001, shortly after starting her new position there.