Hanna Neumann

Hanna Neumann, born Johanna von Caemmerer in 1914 in Lankwitz near Berlin, was a German-born mathematician who worked on group theory. She studied at the University of Berlin, passed the Staatsexamen in mathematics and physics in 1936, and began doctoral work at Göttingen under Helmut Hasse before moving to England in 1938, where she married the group theorist Bernhard Neumann. She completed her D Phil. at Oxford in 1944 under Olga Taussky-Todd, taught at Hull and Manchester, and from 1964 held the chair of pure mathematics at the Australian National University. She is best known for her book Varieties of Groups of 1967, for the Higman-Neumann-Neumann construction she shares with her husband, and for the conjecture that bears her name. She died in 1971 during a lecture tour in Ottawa.