Grete Hermann
Grete (Henry-)Hermann (* March 2, 1901 in Bremen, †April 15, 1984 in Bremen) was a German mathematician and philosopher. She studied mathematics at Göttingen under Emmy Noether, where she achieved her Ph.D. in 1926. Her doctoral thesis, Die Frage der endlich vielen Schritte in der Theorie der Polynomideale, published in Mathematische Annalen, is the foundational paper for computer algebra. It first established the existence of algorithms (including complexity bounds) for many of the basic problems of abstract algebra, such as ideal membership for polynomial rings. Hermann's algorithm for primary decomposition is still in use now.
As Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, Hermann participated in the underground movement against the Nazis, but by 1936 she left Germany for Denmark and later England. She returned when World War II was over. In her later years she was more interested in politics and philosophy than in physics and mathematics.
As a philosopher, Hermann had a particular interest in the foundations of physics. In 1935 she discovered a flaw in John von Neumann's purported 1932 proof, which maintained that a hidden variable theory of quantum mechanics was impossible. The result went unnoticed by the physics community until it was rediscovered by John Stewart Bell.
Werner Heisenberg, in chapter ten of The Part and The Whole discusses Grete Hermann's work.
- This article incorporates material from Grete Hermann on PlanetMath, which is licensed under the GFDL.
