With her passing, mathematics lost one of the few women with stature and reputation.
Olga Taussky, as her maiden name was, personifies the century that has brought harm to Europe. She was born on 30 August 1906, and she writes in her autobiography [1] "in Olmiitz, then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire; it is now called Olomouc, in Czechoslovakia". This remark shows that she had preserved a bit of Austria until the end of her life. Olga was the second of three children, all girls. The family moved to Vienna when Olga was three years old; there she attended the elementary school. In 1916, her father, an industrial chemist, accepted a leading position in Linz, in Upper Austria. For the family, this was a great advantage, since "food during the war years (1914 1918) was slightly more plentyful in Linz" than it was in the capital Vienna, "In Vienna we were often close to starvation".
Olga entered secondary school (Mittelschule) in 1920 and the Gymnasium in 1921. She composed piano pieces and wrote poems, somewhat more seriously than was customary for a high school girl. She also liked Latin and found it not difficult. But more and more she became interested in and had fun with mathematics; in her recollection she writes "mathematics came to me at that time as an experimental subject, for I started to study the laws of the integers computationally". No wonder that she oriented herself later towards Number Theory and stayed faithful to this decision. English translation of article originally published by the author in Jahrhuch der Bayeriwhen Akadernie der Wissengschqften, 1995, pp. 14.