In 1931 she received her Ph.D. on projective geometry under the direction of Max Dehn, and in 1932 spent a fellowship year in Rome.

[1] Denied permission to teach by the minister of education of Nazi Germany, she worked at Research and Development of Krupp (battleships, U-boats, tanks, howitzers, guns, etc.

At the end of World War II she was leading the Department of Applied Mathematics at the arms industry of Krupp.

She was responsible for ground-breaking work on non-associative algebraic structures, including the Moufang loops named after her.

Such connections between geometry and algebra had been previously noted by Karl von Staudt and David Hilbert.