Lucy Mensing: Early life and education

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 advisor was Hamburg’s professor of theoretical physics, Wilhelm Lenz, but because of Lenz’s poor health she worked mainly with his assistant, Wolfgang Pauli.

Cite this resource

Michel Janssen, “Lucy Mensing,” American Institute of Physics, 2025. http://www.aip.org/history/lucy-mensing.