Olga Taussky-Todd

Who was Olga Taussky-Todd?

Olga Taussky-Todd was an Austrian and later Czech-American mathematician.

Olga Taussky was born into a Jewish family; her father, Julius David Taussky, was an industrial chemist and her mother, Ida Pollach, was a housewife. She worked first in algebraic number theory, with a doctorate at the University of Vienna supervised by Philipp Furtwängler. During that time in Vienna she also attended the meetings of the Vienna Circle.

According to Gian-Carlo Rota, as a young mathematician she was hired by a group of German mathematicians to find and correct the many mathematical errors in the works of David Hilbert, so that they could be collected into a volume to be presented to him on his birthday. There was only one paper, on the continuum hypothesis, that she was unable to repair.

Later, she started to use matrices to analyze vibrations of airplanes during World War II, at the National Physical Laboratory in the United Kingdom. She became the torchbearer for matrix theory. In 1935, she moved to England and became a Fellow at Girton College, Cambridge University, as well as at Bryn Mawr College. In 1938 she married the British mathematician John Todd, a colleague at the University of London.