Erika Pannwitz


Erika Pannwitz was a German mathematician who worked in the area of geometric topology. During World War II, Pannwitz worked as a cryptanalyst in the Department of Signal Intelligence Agency of the German Foreign Office colloquially known as Pers Z S.

Education and thesis

Erika Pannwitz attended the Pannwitz Outdoor School in Hohenlychen until 10th grade, and graduated from Augusta State School in Berlin in 1922. She studied mathematics in Berlin, and also for a semester in Freiburg and Göttingen. After passing her teaching exam in 1927, Pannwitz was promoted in 1931 to Dr Phil at Friedrich Wilhelms University with doctoral advisors Heinz Hopf and Erhard Schmidt. Her thesis titled: Eine elementargeometrische Eigenschaft von Verschlingungen und Knoten, which appeared two years later in the prestigious journal Mathematische Annalen, was honored opus eximium being considered an outstanding thesis. Both doctoral advisors wrote extraordinary statements about the thesis. Hopf in particular wrote eight pages of comments and left a summary quoted below:
Schmidt also wrote an extraordinary statement on the thesis:
In her thesis, she established that every piecewise linear knot in general position has a quadrisecant, i.e., four collinear points. The topic was suggested to her by Otto Toeplitz.

Later career

In September 1930, Pannwitz became an editor of Jahrbuch über die Fortschritte der Mathematik. From 1940 to 1945, she worked in the cryptography service as part of the war effort. After Germany's defeat in World War II, she briefly held an assistant position at Marburg University. In 1946, she returned to Berlin to work as an editor for Zentralblatt für Mathematik. Travel to work was awkward, especially after the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, because she lived in West Berlin and had to pass through checkpoints to reach the Zentralblatt offices in East Berlin. East Germany at that time had mandatory retirement at age 60, which she reached in 1964. From 1964 to 1969 she worked at the Zentralblatt office in West Berlin.
Although Pannwitz had written what was considered an outstanding thesis, throughout her career, she never held a regular academic position. The reasons for this are unknown, but there could have been some element of discrimination, perhaps due to her gender or politics or both.

Publications