Hedwig

Hedwig Kohn (1887-1964) was a German-American physicist who was one of only three women to obtain habilitation (the qualification for university teaching) in physics in Germany before World War II. She was forced to leave Germany during the Nazi regime because she was Jewish. She continued her academic career in the United States, where she settled for the rest of her life.

Kohn was trained by Otto Lummer in the quantitative determination of the intensity of light, both from broad-band sources, such as a "black body", and from the discrete emission lines of atoms and molecules. She further developed such methods and devised ways of extracting information from intensity measurements and from emission line shapes. Some of her articles in scientific journals are still being cited into the 2000s.