Eleonore Trefftz

Eleonore Trefftz (15 August 1920 – 22 October 2017) was a German physicist known for her work on molecular and nuclear physics. She was appointed as a Scientific Member of the Max Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysics in 1971.

Biography Trefftz was born in Aachen, North Rhine-Westphalia, on 15 August 1920. She was raised in Loschwitz, Dresden from 1923, after her father Erich Trefftz was appointed as a professor of applied mechanics at TU Dresden in 1922. Between 1941 and 1945, Trefftz studied at TU Dresden and remained here until 1948, where she engaged in research and made assignments on theoretical physics, assisted by Friedrich Hund. In 1948, Trefftz became a research assistant at the Max Planck Institute in Göttingen, where she researched the transition probabilities of spectral lines. Minor planet 7266 Trefftz, discovered in 1973, was named in her honour.