February 12, 1914 - November 14, 1971
Hanna (von Caemmerer) Neumann was born in Berlin, Germany. She completed her D.Phil at Oxford in 1944. Her research supervisor was Olga Taussky-Todd. As M.F. Newman writes [1], "Her thesis was largely written by candlelight in a rented trailer, to which the difficulties of finding housing had forced the family to move. The typing was done on a card table by a haystack when the weather permitted." Parts of her thesis on "Sub-group Structure of Free Products of Groups with an Amalgamated Subgroup" were published in two parts in the American Journal of Mathematics [Abstract]. After many years of teaching in England, in 1964 she became head of the Department of Pure Mathematics in the National University's School of General Studies in Australia. She was one of the founding vice-presidents of the Australian Association of Mathematics Teachers in 1966. She is well known for her book Varieties of Groups, published in 1967.
Read a reprint of the extensive biographical memoir from the Records of the Australian Academy of Science.