Monday, May 30, 2011

Whatever happened to Lilly Hahn?


I've recently been poring over 'The Crisis in Intuition' - a paper by Hans Hahn, founding member of the Vienna circle and early 20th century mathematician. At one point, he is passionately describing the removal of intuition from mathematics and says, 'The simple geometric proposition that "every closed polygon that does not cross itself divides the plane into two separate parts" requires a lengthy and highly complicated proof. This is true to an even greater degree of the analogous proposition of solid geometry: "every closed polyhedron that does not intersect itself divides space into two separate parts.'

The latter proof is referenced, and upon checking the end notes, I found that it was published by one 'Lilly Hahn'.

Lilly, thought I, a woman? Sister to Hans? Getting excited I googled 'Lilly Hahn', and found one relevant hit, in the wikipedia article on Hans: 'He married in 1909 Eleonore ("Lilly") Hahn, and they had a baby, Nora'. That was all. So she was his wife, but... but...where did she come from? Where did she train? What else did she prove? So far, I can't find anything about her - no articles on Google scholar, no other mention of her work. How perfectly infuriating. This is not the only one. The history of mathematics (and science) is littered with such desaparecidas.

2 comments:

  1. I was trying to determine the identity of the book reviewer "L. H." for the math journal "Monatshefte fur Mathematik" (around 1910), and decided it was likely "Lilly Hahn" who wrote a paper for that journal in 1914. Googling for information about her, I found your blog post. I spent about an hour, but I finally found some BASIC information about her: Eleonore [Lilly] Minor until 1909, in which year she married Hans Hahn and became Eleonore [Lilly] Hahn. She was born in 1885 and died in 1934.
    https://books.google.com/books?id=75tiAAAAMAAJ&dq=%22Eleonore+Minor+heiratete%22&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=Eleonore

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  2. I was trying to determine the identity of the book reviewer "L. H." for the math journal "Monatshefte fur Mathematik" (around 1910), and decided it was likely "Lilly Hahn" who wrote a paper for that journal in 1914. Googling for information about her, I found your blog post. I spent about an hour, but I finally found some BASIC information about her: Eleonore [Lilly] Minor until 1909, in which year she married Hans Hahn and became Eleonore [Lilly] Hahn. She was born in 1885 and died in 1934.
    https://books.google.com/books?id=75tiAAAAMAAJ&dq=%22Eleonore+Minor+heiratete%22&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=Eleonore

    ReplyDelete