Lucy Mensing: Further resources
Photographs
Lucy Mensing circa 1928.
AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Mensing Collection, Gift of Dr. Dorothea Roloff.
Lucy Mensing in 1925 or 1926.
AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Mensing Collection, Gift of Dr. Dorothea Roloff.
Lucy Mensing (front left), Wilhelm Schütz (front right), Alfred Landé (far right), and unidentified others sit around a table at the University of Tübingen, circa 1928.
AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Lande Collection.
Group photograph of researchers and others at the Tübingen Institute, circa 1927, inluding Lucy Mensing (seated, second row, center left), physics program director Walther Gerlach (center, next to Mensing), Alfred Landé (standing, second to last row, second from left). Others are unidentified, though the man raising his finger on the far right may be Peter Debye.
AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Mensing Collection, Gift of Dr. Dorothea Roloff.
Researchers from the Tübingen Institute on an excursion to the Black Forest, early May 1927, including Lucy Mensing (front row, center left), Wilhelm Schütz (facing her, center right), and Alfred Landé (second from the left).
AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Mensing Collection, Gift of Dr. Dorothea Roloff.
Researchers from the Tübingen Institute line up and shake hands with Walther Gerlach during an excursion by bus, circa 1926. The sign in the bus reads “Physikal. Institut/Zürich-Tübingen.” Lucy Mensing is in the white blouse on the left. Others are unidentified.
AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Mensing Collection, Gift of Dr. Dorothea Roloff
Researchers from the Tübingin Institute on an excursion in 1926, including Lucy Mensing (bottom row, fourth from right), Alfred Landé (bottom row, third from left), Wilhelm Shütz (upper row, second from left).
AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Mensing Collection, Gift of Dr. Dorothea Roloff.
James Franck and Gustav Ludwig Hertz visit Tübingen in November 1926 on their trip to the Nobel ceremony in Stockholm. In the center are Alfred Landé, Walther Gerlach (behind the fence, director of the Tübingen physics program), and Lucy Mensing. Hendrik A. Kramers is to Mensing’s left (fourth from the right), followed by James Franck (third from right), and Gustav Hertz (second from right). Others are unidentified.
AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Mensing Collection, Gift of Dr. Dorothea Roloff
From left: Hermann Auer, Franz Lauster, Wilhelm Schütz, Lucy Mensing, and Walter Graffunder pose for a photograph in front of the Würzburg Residenz in Würzburg, Germany.
AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Mensing Collection, Gift of Dr. Dorothea Roloff
Lucy, Jürgen, and Wilhelm Schütz in Niendorf or Timmendorfer Strand in northern Germany.
AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Goudsmit Collection.
Lucy Schütz (second from left), Lise Meitner (center), Wilhelm Schütz (right), and unidentified others on a hike in the Ötztal in the Austrian alps in 1934.
AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Mensing Collection, Gift of Dr. Dorothea Roloff.
Werner Heisenberg (left) speaks with Lucy Mensing (center). The photo is said to have been taken at a joint East–West conference of the German Physical Society in Berlin in 1952, though no record of such a meeting has as yet been located. The woman on the right is identified only by the last name Meißner.
AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Mensing Collection, Gift of Dr. Dorothea Roloff.
Scholarship
Charles Midwinter and Michel Janssen. “Kuhn Losses Regained: Van Vleck from Spectra to Susceptibilities.” In Research and Pedagogy: A History of Early Quantum Physics Through Its Textbooks, edited by Massimiliano Badino and Jaume Navarro. Edition Open Access, 2013. doi.org/10.34663/9783945561249-08.
Gernot Münster. "(K)eine klassische Karriere?” Physik Journal 19, no. 6 (2020): 30–34, pro-physik.de/zeitschriften/download/19857.
Gernot Münster and Michel Janssen. “Angular and Career Momentum: What Lucy Mensing Contributed to Physics and Why She Left the Field.” In Women in the History of Quantum Physics: Beyond Knabenphysik, edited by Patrick Charbonneau, Michelle Frank, Margriet van der Heijden, and Daniela Monaldi. Cambridge University Press, 2025.
Find copies on Worldcat.
AIP resources
Video
Photographs
Oral histories
- Interview with Samuel Goudsmit, Dec. 5 and 7, 1963
- Interview with John Van Vleck, Oct. 2 and 4, 1963
- Interview with John Van Vleck, Feb. 28, 1966
Cite this resource
Michel Janssen, “Lucy Mensing,” American Institute of Physics, 2025. http://www.aip.org/history/lucy-mensing.