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:
“Infants and young children are not just sitting twiddling their thumbs, waiting for their parents to teach them to read and do math. They are expending a vast amount of time and effort in exploring and understanding their immediate world. Healthy education supports and encourages this spontaneous learning.”
—David Elkind (20th century)
“To me education is a leading out of what is already there in the pupil’s soul. To Miss Mackay it is a putting in of something that is not there, and that is not what I call education, I call it intrusion.”
—Muriel Spark (b. 1918)
“Institutions of higher education in the United States are products of Western society in which masculine values like an orientation toward achievement and objectivity are valued over cooperation, connectedness and subjectivity.”
—Yolanda Moses (b. 1946)