Olga Taussky-Todd

Olga Taussky-Todd (August 30, 1906 – October 7, 1995) was an Austrian and later Czech-American mathematician. She published more than 300 research papers on algebraic number theory, integral matrices, and matrices in algebra and analysis. Early life Olga Taussky was born into a Jewish family in what is now Olomouc, Czech Republic, on August 30, 1906. Her father, Julius David Taussky, was an industrial chemist and her mother, Ida Pollach, was a housewife. She was the second of three children. Her father preferred that, if his daughters had careers, they be in the arts, but they all went into the sciences. Ilona, three years older than Olga, became a consulting chemist in the glyceride industry, and Hertha, three years younger than Olga, became a pharmacist and later a clinical chemist at Cornell University Medical College in New York City. At the age of three, her family moved to Vienna and lived there until the middle of World War I. Later Taussky's father accepted a position as director of a vinegar factory at Linz in Upper Austria. At a young age, Taussky displayed a keen interest in mathematics. After her father died during her last year at school, she worked through the summer at her father's vinegar factory and was pressured by her family to study chemistry in order to take over her father's work. Her elder sister, however, qualified in chemistry and took over her father's work. In "Red Vienna" of the day, the Social Democratic Party of Austria encouraged woman to pursue higher education, and Taussky enrolled at the University of Vienna in the fall of 1925 to study mathematics. Career Taussky worked first in algebraic number theory, with a doctorate at the University of Vienna supervised by Philipp Furtwängler, a number theorist from Germany. During that time, she attended meetings of the so-called Vienna Circle, the group of philosophers and logicians developing the philosophy of logical positivism. Taussky, like Olga Hahn-Neurath and Rose Rand, was one of the first women to join the group, which included Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, and Kurt Gödel and which was strongly influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein.