Olga Hahn-Neurath, née Hahn

*July 20, 1882 (Vienna, Austria)
†July 20, 1937 (The Hague, Netherlands)

Olga Hahn was born on July 20th 1882 in Vienna as the youngest daughter of Ludwig Benedikt Hahn (1844–1925), a member of the Imperial Court Council, and his wife Emma Hahn (1850–1940), née Blümel. Her elder sister, Ludovica Sophia Fraenkel-Hahn (1878–1939), was a painter, her brother Hans Hahn (1879–1934) was a mathematician and later a founding member of the Vienna Circle. She maintained close relationships with both her siblings and her parents throughout her life.

In the autumn of 1902, she enrolled as a student at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Vienna, where she attended lectures in mathematics and philosophy.

In 1904, she became completely blind as a result of optic neuritis. Despite her visual impairment, she was able to continue her scientific work with the support of her social and intellectual circle, most notably Otto Neurath.

In 1909, she published two mathematical-logical essays in the Archiv für systematische Philosophie (Vol. 15): “Zum Dualismus in der Logik” (co-authored with Otto Neurath) and “Zur Axiomatik des logischen Gebietskalküls”.

In 1910, she submitted her dissertation Über die Koeffizienten einer logischen Gleichung und ihre Beziehungen zur Lehre von den Schlüssen, and subsequently, in 1911, became the third woman to complete a doctoral degree in philosophy at the University of Vienna.

On May 5th 1912, she married the philosopher Otto Neurath and thereafter started using the double surname Hahn-Neurath.

In 1921, they moved into an apartment in Vienna’s Margareten district, which became an important venue for informal meetings of the Vienna Circle in the following years, with Olga Hahn-Neurath playing a central role in hosting these gatherings.

From 1924 onward, she was also an active member of the Vienna Circle, to which she belonged until 1934.

In that year, she and her husband emigrated to the Netherlands for political reasons and settled in The Hague. There, Hahn-Neurath lived a largely secluded life.

For a large part of her life, Olga Hahn-Neurath only had limited access to scientific literature. Because of her visual impairment, she depended on braille texts; at the beginning of the twentieth century, specialist literature in this format was scarce, this was an additional obstacle to her work in the field of logic.

Olga Hahn-Neurath died in The Hague on July 20th 1937, her fifty-fifth birthday, following a medically necessitated kidney operation.

Patricia Grill

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