Herta Taussig Freitag was an Austrian-American mathematician whose life ran from the cultured, precarious world of interwar Vienna to a long career teaching and writing about numbers in Virginia. She was born Herta Taussig in Vienna on 6 December 1908, the daughter of Josef Heinrich Israel Taussig, managing editor of the newspaper Die Neue Freie Presse, and Paula Caroline Sara Taussig. Her older brother, Walter Adolf Taussig, born earlier the same year, became a conductor associated with the Metropolitan Opera and the Salzburg Festival. Evenings in the Taussig household were described as orderly and shared: her father read, her mother did needlework, Walter composed, and Herta worked at mathematics.
She fixed on the subject early. At twelve she wrote in her diary that she had finally found a field in which she did not need to memorize but could think things out for herself. She later refined the ambition: she did not merely want to teach mathematics; she wanted to be a good teacher of it. At the gymnasium, mathematics was treated as a subject that deserved undivided attention, never scheduled as the first lesson of the day or the last before lunch. She entered the University of Vienna to train as a gymnasium teacher of mathematics and physics, living at home and tutoring to help with family finances. She and her fellow students were idealistic. Positions were scarce and Vienna was crowded with qualified teachers, yet they studied because they wanted to teach. In 1934 she received the degree Magister Rerum Naturalium. Her teaching certificate noted an extraordinary command of language that made complicated topics accessible. Kurt Gödel had completed his doctorate in logic at the same university a few years earlier; Freitag later recalled that she and her friends enjoyed catching the eye of the young logician.
She taught in Vienna from 1934 to 1938, first as a student teacher and then as a Gymnasium professor. The Anschluss ended that career. On 11 March 1938 Hitler issued an ultimatum; German troops crossed the border the next morning, and on 13 March Austria was absorbed into the Reich. Josef Taussig, who had written editorials warning against Nazism, was dismissed within days. Herta remembered his toneless remark that there was no Austria anymore. The family withdrew briefly to a summer cottage in the mountains to plan an escape. Emigration to the United States required a sponsor and a place in a quota, so she accepted a visa to Britain on the condition that she work as a domestic servant. Her parents followed. After the outbreak of war in September 1939 the family, now classified as German by annexation, appeared before tribunals as enemy aliens and were exempted from internment restrictions. In England she worked as a housemaid, governess, waitress, and eventually again as a teacher. Her father died in Cirencester in November 1942, content, it was later said, that his family had escaped Austria and would eventually reunite in America.
Herta and her mother sailed from Liverpool on the Delftdijk on 5 April 1944, part of a convoy of nearly a hundred ships that took a long route to avoid submarines and reached New York on 25 April after twenty-one days. Fog hid the Statue of Liberty; her brother Walter met them. An agency placed her at Greer School in Dutchess County, New York, a school for disadvantaged children. She taught there from 1944 to 1948 and later said the students accepted her once they discovered that she too had been pushed around. In her second year she met Arthur Henry Freitag, a mathematics teacher born in 1898. They married in 1950. Summers were spent at Columbia University. She received a master’s degree in 1948 and, in 1953, a doctorate for the thesis “The Use of the History of Mathematics in its Teaching and Learning on the Secondary Level.” The abstract argued that studying mathematical ideas in their historical development could deepen understanding, improve retention, and show the obstacles that meanings had to surmount. She named Edward Kasner and Howard Eves among the teachers who most shaped her.
In 1948 she joined Hollins College, a private women’s college in Roanoke, Virginia, as an instructor. She built a mathematics department in which, at the start, she was the only member, teaching seven courses in a language that was not her own, while still completing the Columbia doctorate. She rose to full professor and department chair. She and Arthur wrote jointly, including papers on neopythagorean triangles and on the use of history in secondary teaching. In 1960 they produced the monograph The Number Story at the request of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. She published in The Mathematics Teacher, The Arithmetic Teacher, and Mathematics Magazine, spoke often in schools, and lectured at Virginia and North Carolina governor’s schools. In 1962 she became the first woman to serve as president of the Maryland–District of Columbia–Virginia section of the Mathematical Association of America. She was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1959, received the Hollins Medal in 1979 as the first faculty member so honored, and in 1980 was named Virginia College Mathematics Teacher of the Year. She became a United States citizen in 1949.
She took early retirement in 1971 to care for Arthur, who had fallen ill; he died in 1978. Retirement did not end her mathematical life. Most of her research on Fibonacci numbers and related recursive sequences appeared after she left full-time teaching, a fact colleagues later cited against the belief that mathematicians do their best work before forty. She published more than thirty articles in The Fibonacci Quarterly after 1985, contributed steadily to its elementary problems section, and attended every International Conference on Fibonacci Numbers and Their Applications from the first meeting in 1984, presenting a paper at each. Collaborators included George M. Phillips and Piero Filipponi. Representative titles include work on summations and expansions of Fibonacci numbers, congruence relations for recursive sequences, Fibonacci autocorrelation sequences, and the division of Fibonacci numbers by an integer k. A colleague, echoing Gauss’s remark about number theory, called her the queen of the Fibonacci Association. The November 1996 issue of The Fibonacci Quarterly was dedicated to her as she entered her eighty-ninth year—89 itself a Fibonacci number—in recognition of teaching, problem solving, lecturing, and research. She sometimes returned to Hollins to teach in a master’s program in liberal studies.
She described herself not as a mathematician but as a student of mathematics, and an addicted one. She liked being called a problemist. One of her remarks, often repeated, was that a mathematician is like a lover: give him a little finger and he wants the whole hand. Of the six years when mathematics was largely out of reach she said the experience had sharpened her appreciation of ordinary joys and of her adopted country. Other interests included people, swimming, and art. A biography, One-way Ticket: The True Story of Herta Taussig Freitag, by Mary Ann Johnson, appeared in 1988. She died in Roanoke on 25 January 2000 at the age of ninety-one. Her career is a record of interrupted training restored, of teaching carried on in a second language, and of a late, sustained contribution to the elementary and recreational theory of recursive sequences.
CONCLUSIONS
A leader is defined not only by her work, but also by her personality.