Grete Hermann

Grete Hermann (1901 to 1984) was a German mathematician, philosopher and educator, born in Bremen. At the University of Goettingen she was the first doctoral student of Emmy Noether and also studied under Edmund Landau. Her 1925 thesis, published in 1926, on finitely many steps in polynomial ideal theory, gave algorithms with complexity bounds for basic problems such as ideal membership in polynomial rings, and is regarded as foundational for computer algebra. She then turned to the philosophy of physics, arguing that quantum mechanics clarifies rather than abandons causality, and criticised John von Neumann's 1932 no hidden variables proof, a critique that went largely unnoticed until the 1970s. A socialist, she worked with the Internationaler Sozialistischer Kampfbund against Nazism, lived in exile in Denmark and Britain, and after the war taught in Karlsruhe and led the Bremen Pedagogical University. She co-founded the journal Ratio and died in Bremen in 1984.