Tatyana Afanasyeva

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Tatyana Afanasyeva

Tatyana Alexeyevna Afanasyeva (Russian: Татьяна Алексеевна Афанасьева) (Kiev, November 19, 1876 – Leiden, April 14, 1964) was a Russian /Dutch mathematician. On December 21, 1904 she was married to Paul Ehrenfest (1880–1933) an Austrian physicist and a mathematician. They had two daughters and two sons: one daughter, Tatyana Pavlovna Ehrenfest, also became a mathematician.

Afanasyeva was born in Kiev in the Russian Empire (now in Ukraine). After her father died she was brought up by an uncle in St Petersburg, Russia, where she attended a women's pedagogical school and a Women's College. In 1902 she transferred to Göttingen, where she met Ehrenfest. The couple got married in 1904, and in 1907 they returned to St Petersburg. In 1912 they moved to Leiden, where Paul Ehrenfest was appointed to succeed H.A. Lorentz as professor at the University of Leiden.
Tatyana collaborated closely with her husband, more famously on their classical review of the statistical mechanics of Boltzmann^[1]. She published many papers on various topics such as randomness^[2] and entropy^[3], and teaching geometry to children^[4]^[5].

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^ P. Ehrenfest & T. Ehrenfest (1911) Begriffliche Grundlagen der statistischen Auffassung in der Mechanik, in: Encyklopädie der mathematischen Wissenschaften mit Einschluß ihrer Anwendungen. Band IV, 2. Teil ( F. Klein and C. Müller (eds.). Leipzig: Teubner, pp. 3–90. Translated as The conceptual Foundations of the Statistical Approach in Mechanics. New York: Cornell University Press, 1959. ISBN 0-486-49504-3
^ T. Ehrenfest-Afanassjewa, Die Grundlagen der Thermodynamik (Leiden 1956)
^ T. Ehrenfest-Afanassjewa, On the Use of the Notion "Probability" in Physics Am. J. Phys. 26: 388 (1958)
^ Tatjana Ehrenfest-Afanassjewa, Exercises in Experimental Geometry. 1931PDF (214 KiB).
^ Ed de Moor Van Vormleer naar Realistische Meetkunde, Thesis, Utrecht (1999).