Iris Runge was the eldest of six children of mathematician
Carl Runge. She started studying
physics,
mathematics, and
geography at the
University of Göttingen in 1907, with the aim of becoming a teacher. At that time, she only attended the lectures, since women were not allowed to formally study at
Prussian universities until 1908–1909. She attended lectures given by her father and spent a semester at
LMU Munich working with
Arnold Sommerfeld, which led to her first publication,
Anwendungen der Vektorrechnung auf die Grundlagen der Geometrischen Optik ("Applications of
vector calculations to the fundamentals of
geometric optics") in
Annalen der Physik ("Annals of Physics"). After passing her state exams (higher teachers' exam) in 1912, she taught at several schools (Lyzeum Göttingen, Oberlyzeum Kippenberg near
Bremen). She went back to the university in 1918 to study
chemistry. She took the supplementary examination for teachers in 1920. In 1920, she worked as a teacher at
Schule Schloss Salem. She received her doctorate in 1921 under the supervision of
Gustav Tammann, with a dissertation titled
Über Diffusion im festen Zustande ("On diffusion in the solid state"). As a student, she was a personal assistant to
Leonard Nelson. During the political upheaval in Germany after the
First World War she was active in the election campaign of the
Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Social Democratic Party of Germany, SPD), which at that time implemented
women's suffrage in Germany. She joined the party in 1929. In 1923, she gave up teaching and worked at
Osram as an
industrial mathematician.
Ellen Lax, who obtained her doctorate in 1919 under
Walther Nernst, was Runge's colleague there. There, in accordance with the company's products (light bulbs and
radio tubes), she worked on
heat conduction problems, electron emission in tubes, and statistics for quality control in mass production. On the last topic Runge co-authored a then-standard textbook. In 1929, she was promoted to a senior company official. From 1929 she was in the radio tubes department, and after the department was acquired by
Telefunken in 1939, she moved to work in the new company until the dissolution of the laboratory in 1945. After 1945, she taught at the adult education center in
Spandau and was a research assistant at
Technische Universität Berlin. In 1947, she
qualified as a professor at the
Humboldt University of Berlin. Her inaugural lecture was titled
Über das Rauschen von Elektronenröhren ("On the noise in
electron tubes"); her published works were accepted in lieu of a habilitation thesis. In 1947, she was offered a teaching position there, and she worked until 1949 as an assistant to
Friedrich Möglich, the chair of the theoretical physics division at Humboldt University. In November 1949 she was appointed as a lecturer, and in July 1950 she became a professor with a teaching assignment. She was one of three women professors in the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, the other two being
Elisabeth Schiemann and
Katharina Boll-Dornberger. From March 1949, she also worked part-time again for Telefunken. In 1952, she became an
emeritus professor at Humboldt University, where she gave lectures on theoretical physics until the summer semester of 1952. She lived in
West Berlin until 1965, and then moved to live with her brother in
Ulm. She translated the book
What Is Mathematics? by
Richard Courant (who was married to one of her sisters) and
Herbert Robbins into
German, and wrote a biography of her father,
Carl Runge und sein wissenschaftliches Werk ("Carl Runge and his scientific works"). == Publications ==