Hedwig Kohn physicist: Google Doodle celebrates life and work of remarkable trailblazer

Google’s latest doodle honours German physicist Hedwig Kohn on what would have been her 132^nd birthday.

A pioneer of her field, Kohn became one of only three women to hold a university teaching position in Germany prior to World War Two.

Born in Breslau, which is now Wroclaw, Poland on 5 April 1887, Kohn was awarded her doctorate in 1913 before moving on to teaching.

In 1933, during the era of Nazi Germany, she was dismissed from her position at the University of Breslau because she was Jewish. Struggling to get a work visa, Kohn would remain in the country until 1940, when she fled to the US.

She pursued her passion for teaching in the states, holding positions at the Women’s College of the University of North Carolina and Wellesley College in Massachusetts.

Alongside teaching, she worked tirelessly in her basement lab, honing her expertise on electromagnetic radiation and molecular spectroscopy, before taking on a research position at Duke University.

At the end of her career, Kohn published more than 20 journals and her work on radiometry was written into hundreds of textbook pages.

Kohn died in 1964 at the age of 77.

The doodle created in her honour was drawn by guest artist Carolin Löbbert and depicts Kohn in a lab measuring emission spectra surrounded by atomic structures and beakers.