Mathwar/Personlist/Moufang Ruth
Ruth Moufang
(* January 10th 1905 in Darmstadt, † November 26th 1977 in Frankfurt)
Life
Ruth Moufang was supervised by Dehn and obtained a Ph.D. in 1931 on projective geometry. From 1931 to 1937 she studied projective planes introducing Moufang planes and non-associative systems called Moufang loops.
The Nazis, to be precise Hitler's minister of education, refused Moufang permission to teach (because she was a woman), so from 1937 she became an industrial mathematician working on elasticity theory. In fact this gives Moufang the unique position of being the first German woman with a doctorate to be employed in industry. She may actually be the first ever such woman anywhere.
Moufang published only one paper on group theory which was published in 1937. In this paper, which is motivated by the two papers of Hilbert on geometry mentioned above (published in 1901 and 1930), she examines the group M = F/F, the free metabelian group on two generators. She proves that the rational group algebra of this group can be embedded in an ordered division ring. As a consequence it is easy to show that M contains a copy of the free semigroup on two generators. Moufang also gives applications of the result to number theory, knot theory and the foundations of geometry.