Herta Freitag was an Austrian

Austrians

Austrians are a nation and ethnic group, consisting of the population of the Republic of Austria and its historical predecessor states who share a common Austrian culture and Austrian descent....

-American mathematician, a professor of mathematics at Hollins College

Hollins University

Hollins University is a four-year institution of higher education, a private university located on a campus on the border of Roanoke County, Virginia and Botetourt County, Virginia...

, known for her work on the Fibonacci numbers.

She was born as Herta Taussig in Vienna

Vienna

Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...

, Austria

Austria

Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...

. She earned a master's degree from the University of Vienna

University of Vienna

The University of Vienna is a public university located in Vienna, Austria. It was founded by Duke Rudolph IV in 1365 and is the oldest university in the German-speaking world...

 in 1934 and took a teaching position at the university. However, her father (the editor of Die Neue Freie Presse) had publicly opposed the Nazis, so in 1938 she and her parents emigrated to England, taking a job as a maid because the English immigration laws prevented her from entering the country as a teacher. In 1944 she and her mother moved to the United States (her father having died a year earlier), and began teaching mathematics again at the Greer School in upstate New York.

She earned a second master's degree in 1948 from Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

, and a doctorate from Columbia in 1953. Meanwhile, in 1948, she had joined the faculty at Hollins, where she eventually became a full professor and department chair. In 1962 she served as a section president for the Mathematical Association of America

Mathematical Association of America

The Mathematical Association of America is a professional society that focuses on mathematics accessible at the undergraduate level. Members include university, college, and high school teachers; graduate and undergraduate students; pure and applied mathematicians; computer scientists;...

, the first woman in her section to do so. She retired in 1971, but returned to teaching again in 1979 after the death of her husband, Arthur Freitag, whom she had married in 1950.

After her retirement, she became a frequent contributor to the Fibonacci Quarterly

Fibonacci Quarterly

As the primary publication of The Fibonacci Association, The Fibonacci Quarterly provides a focus for worldwide interest in the Fibonacci number sequence and related mathematics. Published since 1963, its founding editors were Verner Emil Hoggatt, Jr. and Alfred Brousseau...

, and the journal honored her in 1996 by dedicating an issue to her on the occasion of her 89th birthday (89 being a Fibonacci number).