Lindgren is originally from
Chemnitz, where she was born on 2 March 1941. Chemnitz is in
East Germany, and Lindgren became a student at the
University of Freiburg, also in East Germany. She completed a doctorate there in 1969, on topics including the
quadrivium and the early life of
Pope Sylvester II. At some point after this, she emigrated to West Germany, and completed a
habilitation in 1978 at the
University of Cologne, on the medieval history of
Barcelona. She then became a researcher at the
University of Munich. Her work on the
history of cartography began in the early 1980s. She had her first publication on this topic in 1985, on the geography of
Ptolemy, and a year later organized a conference on historic maps of the
Alps. She took up a professorial chair at the
University of Bayreuth in 1987, and returned in 2006. Her publications from this period include works on medieval knowledge of the
figure of the Earth, on the biographies and discoveries of medieval and Renaissance cartographers, and a translation of a Spanish-language travelogue of central Asia. She died on 16 June 2017. ==Recognition==