Margarete Kahn
| Margarete Kahn | |
|---|---|
| Born |
27 August 1880 Eschwege, German Empire |
| Died | 28 March 1942 (aged 61) (deported to Piaski on this date, and missing since then) Piaski, Poland |
| Residence | Germany |
| Citizenship | German |
| Nationality | German |
| Fields | Mathematics (algebraic geometry) |
| Alma mater | University of Göttingen |
| Thesis | Eine allgemeine Methode zur Untersuchung der Gestalten algebraischer Kurven [A general method for the study of the forms of algebraic curves] (1909) |
| Doctoral advisor | David Hilbert |
| Other academic advisors | Felix Klein |
Margarete Kahn (known as Grete Kahn, born 27 August 1880, missing after deportation to Piaski, Poland on 28 March 1942) was a German mathematician and Holocaust victim. She was among the first women to obtain a doctorate in Germany. Her doctoral work was on the topology of algebraic curves.
Margarete Kahn was the daughter of Eschwege merchant and flannel factory owner Albert Kahn (1853–1905) and his wife Johanne (née Plaut, 1857–1882). She had an older brother Otto (born 1879). Five years after the untimely death of his wife Johanne, their father married her younger sister Julie (1860–1934), with whom he had a daughter, Margaret's half-sister Martha (born 1888).
After attending elementary school from 1887, and the Higher School for Girls from 1889 to 1896, Kahn until 1904 took private lessons to prepare for her Abitur, because few high schools for girls existed at that time in Hesse, Germany. In 1904 she was given permission to take her Abitur at the Royal Gymnasium in Bad Hersfeld. Thus she belonged to the small elite of young women in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century who were allowed to take the Abitur externally at boys' schools. Konrad Duden signed her Abitur certificate as school principal.
Since Prussia began to allow women to formally attend university only from the winter semester of 1908–09, Kahn and her friend Klara Löbenstein first attended the universities of Berlin and Göttingen as guest students. In addition, Kahn attended lectures and tutorials in mathematics at the Technical University of Berlin. They studied mathematics, physics, and propaedeutics at Berlin and Göttingen. At the University of Göttingen she attended lectures given by, among others, David Hilbert, Felix Klein, Woldemar Voigt, and Georg Elias Müller; in Berlin she attended lectures by Hermann Amandus Schwarz and Paul Drude at the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences. Her field of expertise was algebraic geometry. Together with Löbenstein she made a contribution to Hilbert's sixteenth problem. Hilbert's sixteenth problem concerned the topology of algebraic curves in the complex projective plane; as a difficult special case in his formulation of the problem Hilbert proposed that there are no algebraic curves of degree 6 consisting of 11 separate ovals. Kahn and Löbenstein developed methods to address this problem.
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