Hedwig Kohn Facts: Google Doodle Honors Jewish Physicist On 132nd Birthday

Google Doodle paid tribute to physicist Hedwig Kohn, one of the only three women certified to teach in a university in Germany during the First World War, on what would have been her 132nd birthday.

“Taking us inside Hedwig Kohn’s lab, today’s Doodle by Hamburg-based guest artist Carolin Löbbert celebrates the life and science of the pioneering physicist,” a Google blog post of about the doodle said. The doodle showed a stylized illustration of Kohn in a laboratory measuring emission spectra, surrounded by atomic structures and a number of beakers.

Kohn was born in a Jewish family in Breslau – situated in modern-day Poland. She was the second woman in the physics department of the city’s university when she got admitted in 1907 – a year before women were officially allowed to matriculate. At the age of 20, she obtained her doctorate after training under notable atomic physicists Otto Lummer and Rudolf Ladenburg.

After graduating, she started teaching through the “Habilitation” program at the university – a term given to the provision of hiring academics to teach at the university – in 1930. However, just three years later, Kohn was dismissed from her teaching position because she was Jewish. She was forced to spend the next few years on research contracts in industrial physics, according to Encyclopedia.

In 1940, with the rise of Adolf Hitler, it became difficult for her to stay in the country. However, she also faced obstacles when it came to fleeing. She was finally able to negotiate a visa and obtain a teaching job in the United States, with the help of the American Association of University Women and the International Federation of University Women [presently named Graduate Women International] – both non-profits dedicated to advancing equal rights for women.

She began teaching at the College at University of North Carolina and then moved onto Wellesley College in Massachusetts, where she taught until 1952. While at Wellesley, she set up a research laboratory for flame spectroscopy. Thereafter, she went onto to become a research associate at Duke University, where she continued her work on flame spectroscopy— the study of using flame as the energy source to excite atoms – which she had started in 1912. In addition to her own research work, she also guided Ph.D students in their research.

Her work in the field of radiation was also extraordinary. She wrote several chapters in the leading physics textbook "Mueller-Pouillets Lehrbuch der Physik," published in 1929. She was awarded a pension and the title of professor emerita by the government of Germany in 1952. Kohn died in 1964.