Olga Taussky-Todd

Olga Taussky was born and Taussky enrolled at the University of Vienna in the fall of 1925 to study mathematics. ==Career==

Taussky worked first in algebraic number theory, with a doctorate at the University of Vienna supervised by Philipp Furtwängler, a number theorist from Germany. During that time, she attended meetings of the so-called Vienna Circle, the group of philosophers and logicians developing the philosophy of logical positivism. Taussky, like Olga Hahn-Neurath and Rose Rand, was one of the first women to join the group, which included Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, and Kurt Gödel and which was strongly influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein. In 1935, she moved to England and became a Fellow at Girton College, Cambridge University, as well as at Bryn Mawr College. Soon after, in 1938, she married the Irish mathematician Jack Todd, a colleague at the University of London. Later, she started to use matrices to analyze vibrations of airplanes during World War II, at the National Physical Laboratory in the United Kingdom. During this time she wrote several articles that were published by the Ministry of Aircraft Production in London. She later described herself as a torchbearer for matrix theory. In 1945 the Todds emigrated to the United States and worked for the National Bureau of Standards. In 1957 she and her husband both joined the faculty of California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, California. She also supervised Caltech's first female Ph.D. in Math, Lorraine Foster, as well as Hanna Neumann, Philip J. Hanlon, and Charles Royal Johnson. Taussky retired from teaching in 1977, but continued her correspondence with other mathematicians regarding her work in matrix theory. ==Awards and honors==

Taussky received the Ford Prize for an article on sum of squares published in 1970 in American Mathematical Monthly. She went on to receive an honorary doctorate from the University of Vienna and an honorary DSc by the University of Southern California in 1988. She was a Fellow of the AAAS, a Noether Lecturer and a recipient of the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art, 1st class (1978). In 1993, the International Linear Algebra Society (ILAS) established a lecture series to honor the contributions to the field of linear algebra made by Taussky-Todd and her husband. In 2021, the Taussky–Todd lecture series was converted to the ILAS Taussky–Todd Prize. ==See also==

• Olga Taussky, "How I became a torchbearer for matrix theory," American Mathematical Monthly. v. 95 (1988) • Olga Taussky, "A recurring theorem on determinants," Amer. Math. Monthly. 56 (1949) 673-676. • Olga Taussky, "Generalized commutators of matrices and permutations of factors in a product of three matrices," in Studies in Mathematics and Mechanics presented to Richard von Mises, Academic Press, NY, 1954, p. 67. • Olga Taussky and John Todd, "Infinite powers of matrices," J. London Math. Soc. 17 (1942) 147-151. • Olga Taussky, "Matrices C with Cn → 0," J. Algebra, 1 (1954) 5-10. • Olga Taussky and John Todd, "Matrices with finite period," Proc. Edinburgh Math. Soc. 6 (1939) 128-134. • Olga Taussky, "On a theorem of Latimer and MacDuffee," Can. J. Math. 1 (1949) 300-302. • Olga Taussky, "Sums of squares", American Mathematical Monthly. v. 77, 1970 ==References==