Education
At the University of Munich Gertrude quickly developed an interest in physics. Although her family had supported her early interested in science, her father encouraged her to study law at Munich. In defense of her decision to study physics Gertrude told her father, “I’m not interested in the law. I want to understand what the world is made of.”
As was usual for students at the time, Gertrude spent semesters at various other universities including the University of Freiburg, the University of Zurich, and the University of Berlin (where she would meet her future husband) before returning to the University of Munich. Upon returning to Munich Gertrude took up a position with Walter Gerlach to perform her thesis research. In her thesis Gertrude studied the effects of stress on magnetization. She graduated in 1935 and published her thesis in 1936.
With the rise to power of the Nazi party in 1933, Gertrude faced increasing difficulties in Germany because of her Jewish heritage. During this time her father was arrested and jailed, and although he and his wife were able to flee to Switzerland upon his release, they later returned to Germany and perished in the The Holocaust. Gertrude remained in Germany until the completion of her Ph.D. in 1935, at which point she fled to London. Although Gertrude's parents did not escape the Nazis her sister Liselotte did.
Read more about this topic: Gertrude Scharff Goldhaber
Famous quotes containing the word education:
“... the whole tenour of female education ... tends to render the best disposed romantic and inconstant; and the remainder vain and mean.”
—Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797)
“Meantime the education of the general mind never stops. The reveries of the true and simple are prophetic. What the tender poetic youth dreams, and prays, and paints today, but shuns the ridicule of saying aloud, shall presently be the resolutions of public bodies, then shall be carried as grievance and bill of rights through conflict and war, and then shall be triumphant law and establishment for a hundred years, until it gives place, in turn, to new prayers and pictures.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)