Katharina Boll-Dornberger (2 November 1909 – 27 July 1981), also known as Käte Dornberger-Schiff, was an Austrian-German physicist and crystallographer.[1][2] She is known for her work on order-disorder structures.[1][3][4][5][6]
Life
Katharina Boll-Dornberger was born in Vienna in 1909 as the daughter of the university professor Walter Karl [de] and Alice Friederike (Gertrude) Schiff.[7] She studied physics and mathematics in Vienna and Göttingen.[8] She wrote her dissertation under supervision of V. M. Goldschmidt on the crystal structure of water-free zinc sulfate in Göttingen and handed it in in Vienna in 1934.[8][9] Afterwards, she conducted research in Philipp Gross's lab in Vienna. In 1937 she emigrated to England.[8] In England, she worked with John D. Bernal, Nevill F. Mott, and Dorothy Hodgkin.[7] She married Paul Dornberger in 1939.[7] Her sons were born in 1943 and 1946.[7] In 1946, she and her family returned to Germany. At first, she worked as a lecturer for physics and mathematics at the Hochschule für Baukunst in Weimar. Then, she moved to East Berlin. Starting in 1948, she was the head of a department at the Institut für Biophysik at the German Academy of Sciences at Berlin.[8] In 1952, she married Ludwig Boll (1911–1984), a German mathematician.[7][10][nb 1] In 1956, she became a professor at the Humboldt University.[7] In 1958, the Institut für Strukturforschung was created and she was head of the institute until 1968.[7] She died in 1981 in Berlin.[7]
Research
Her research focused on the crystallographic investigation of order-disorder structures.[1] She introduced groupoids to crystallography to describe disordered structures.[1] Roughly 2/3 of her 60 publications focused on order-disorder.[1] The other publications dealt with structure determination of organic and inorganic crystals, methods development in single-crystal diffraction, and the development of equipment for this purpose.[1]