Katharina Boll-Dornberger (2 November 1909 – 27 July 1981), also known as Käte Dornberger-Schiff, was an Austrian-German physicist and crystallographer. She is known for her work on order-disorder structures.

Life

Katharina Boll-Dornberger was born in Vienna in 1909 as the daughter of the university professor and Alice Friederike (Gertrude) Schiff. She studied physics and mathematics in

Vienna en, Viennese , iso_code = AT-9 , registration_plate = W , postal_code_type = Postal code , postal_code = , timezone = CET , utc_offset = +1 , timezone_DST ...

and

Göttingen Göttingen (, , ; nds, Chöttingen) is a college town, university city in Lower Saxony, central Germany, the Capital (political), capital of Göttingen (district), the eponymous district. The River Leine runs through it. At the end of 2019, t ...

. She wrote her dissertation under supervision of V. M. Goldschmidt on the crystal structure of water-free zinc sulfate in Göttingen and handed it in in Vienna in 1934. Afterwards, she conducted research in

Philipp Gross Philipp Gross (September 30, 1899 – May 20, 1974) was a physical chemist born and educated in Vienna. He became Professor of Physical Chemistry at Vienna University but was expelled on racial grounds in 1938 under the Nazi regime. In 1939 he sough ...

's lab in Vienna. In 1937 she emigrated to England. In England, she worked with John D. Bernal, Nevill F. Mott, and

Dorothy Hodgkin Dorothy Mary Crowfoot Hodgkin (née Crowfoot; 12 May 1910 – 29 July 1994) was a Nobel Prize-winning British chemist who advanced the technique of X-ray crystallography to determine the structure of biomolecules, which became essential fo ...

. She married Paul Dornberger in 1939. Her sons were born in 1943 and 1946. In 1946, she and her family returned to Germany. At first, she worked as a lecturer for physics and mathematics at the Hochschule für Baukunst in Weimar. Then, she moved to

East Berlin East Berlin was the ''de facto'' capital city of East Germany from 1949 to 1990. Formally, it was the Allied occupation zones in Germany, Soviet sector of Berlin, established in 1945. The American, British, and French sectors were known as ...

. Starting in 1948, she was the head of a department at the Institut für Biophysik at the German Academy of Sciences at Berlin. In 1952, she married Ludwig Boll (1911–1984), a German mathematician. In 1956, she became a professor at the Humboldt University. In 1958, the Institut für Strukturforschung was created and she was head of the institute until 1968. She died in 1981 in Berlin.

Research

Her research focused on the crystallographic investigation of order-disorder structures. She introduced

groupoids In mathematics, especially in category theory and homotopy theory, a groupoid (less often Brandt groupoid or virtual group) generalises the notion of group in several equivalent ways. A groupoid can be seen as a: *''Group'' with a partial func ...

to crystallography to describe disordered structures. Roughly 2/3 of her 60 publications focused on order-disorder. The other publications dealt with structure determination of organic and inorganic crystals, methods development in single-crystal

diffraction Diffraction is defined as the interference or bending of waves around the corners of an obstacle or through an aperture into the region of geometrical shadow of the obstacle/aperture. The diffracting object or aperture effectively becomes a s ...

, and the development of equipment for this purpose.

Awards

For her work in crystallography, she was awarded two national awards by the

German Democratic Republic German(s) may refer to: * Germany (of or related to) **Germania (historical use) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law **Ger ...

: * Patriotic Order of Merit in 1959 * National Prize of the German Democratic Republic in 1960 A street in Berlin is named after her.

Life

Research

Awards

Notes

References

Further reading