Tatyana Pavlovna Ehrenfest, later van Aardenne-Ehrenfest, (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...

, October 28, 1905 – Dordrecht

Dordrecht

Dordrecht , colloquially Dordt, historically in English named Dort, is a city and municipality in the western Netherlands, located in the province of South Holland. It is the fourth largest city of the province, having a population of 118,601 in 2009...

, November 29, 1984) was a Dutch

Netherlands

The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...

 mathematician

Mathematician

A mathematician is a person whose primary area of study is the field of mathematics. Mathematicians are concerned with quantity, structure, space, and change....

. She was the daughter of Paul Ehrenfest

Paul Ehrenfest

Paul Ehrenfest was an Austrian and Dutch physicist, who made major contributions to the field of statistical mechanics and its relations with quantum mechanics, including the theory of phase transition and the Ehrenfest theorem.- Biography :Paul Ehrenfest was born and grew up in Vienna in a Jewish...

 (1880 – 1933) and Tatyana Alexeyevna Afanasyeva (1876–1964).

Tatyana Ehrenfest was born in Vienna, and spent her childhood in St Petersburg

Saint Petersburg

Saint Petersburg is a city and a federal subject of Russia located on the Neva River at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea...

. In 1912 the Ehrenfests moved to Leiden where her father succeeded H.A. Lorentz

Hendrik Lorentz

Hendrik Antoon Lorentz was a Dutch physicist who shared the 1902 Nobel Prize in Physics with Pieter Zeeman for the discovery and theoretical explanation of the Zeeman effect...

 as professor at the University of Leiden

Leiden University

Leiden University , located in the city of Leiden, is the oldest university in the Netherlands. The university was founded in 1575 by William, Prince of Orange, leader of the Dutch Revolt in the Eighty Years' War. The royal Dutch House of Orange-Nassau and Leiden University still have a close...

. Until 1917 she was home schooled, after that she attended the Gymnasium

Stedelijk Gymnasium Leiden

Stedelijk Gymnasium Leiden is a gymnasium in the Netherlands. Located in Leiden, it is one of the oldest schools in the Netherlands. Its history dates back to the Middle Ages...

 in Leiden and passed the final exams in 1922.
She studied mathematics

Mathematics

Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...

 and physics

Physics

Physics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.Physics is one of the oldest academic...

 at the University of Leiden. In 1928 she went to Göttingen

Göttingen

Göttingen is a university town in Lower Saxony, Germany. It is the capital of the district of Göttingen. The Leine river runs through the town. In 2006 the population was 129,686.-General information:...

 where she took courses from Harald Bohr

Harald Bohr

Harald August Bohr was a Danish mathematician and football player. After receiving his doctorate in 1910, Bohr became an eminent mathematician, founding the field of almost periodic functions. His brother was the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Niels Bohr...

 and Max Born

Max Born

Max Born was a German-born physicist and mathematician who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics. He also made contributions to solid-state physics and optics and supervised the work of a number of notable physicists in the 1920s and 30s...

. On December 8, 1931 she obtained her Ph.D. in Leiden.

Under her married name, Tanja van Aardenne-Ehrenfest, she is known for her contributions to De Bruijn sequence

De Bruijn sequence

In combinatorial mathematics, a k-ary De Bruijn sequence B of order n, named after the Dutch mathematician Nicolaas Govert de Bruijn, is a cyclic sequence of a given alphabet A with size k for which every possible subsequence of length n in A appears as a sequence of consecutive characters exactly...

s, the discrepancy theorem

Van der Corput sequence

A van der Corput sequence is a low-discrepancy sequence over the unit interval first published in 1935 by the Dutch mathematician J. G. van der Corput. It is constructed by reversing the base n representation of the sequence of natural numbers...

and the BEST theorem

BEST theorem

In graph theory, a part of discrete mathematics, the BEST theorem gives a product formula for the number of Eulerian circuits in directed graphs. The name is an acronym of the names of people who discovered it: de Bruijn, van Aardenne-Ehrenfest, Smith and Tutte.- Precise statement :Let...

.