Lucy Mensing, 1901-1926: A Promising Physicist

Lucy Mensing was born on March 11, 1901, in Hamburg, the first of four daughters of Hermann Mensing and his wife Martha Luise (née Beer). Like her mother, she attended the St. Johannis monastery school, known for its program (Lehrerinnenseminar) to train women to become teachers. Upon graduation in 1920, she matriculated at the University of Hamburg, founded only the year before, to study physics.

In addition to physics classes, she and her fellow student Ernst Ising took a literature class, which gave them an early appreciation of German expressionist painting .

Mensing graduated in March 1925 with a dissertation on the Stark effect (the splitting of spectral lines when the atoms emitting light are placed in an external electric field) in the context of the old quantum theory. Officially, her adviser was Hamburg’s professor of theoretical physics, Wilhelm Lenz, but because of Lenz’s poor health she worked mainly with his assistant, Wolfgang Pauli.

Mensing won an award for her doctorate and used the money to spend a year in Göttingen. She arrived there in April 1925, right around the time when Max Born and his young collaborators Werner Heisenberg and Pascual Jordan were taking the first steps toward matrix mechanics, the first incarnation of the new quantum mechanics.

During her year in Göttingen, she wrote three important papers , applying the new quantum mechanics to puzzles left unsolved by the old quantum theory.