FLÜGGE-LOTZ

GERMANY (see also List of Individuals)

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3.7.1903 Hameln/D - 22.5.1974 Palo Alto/USA

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Irmgard Flügge-Lotz entered Technical University of Hannover in 1923 and graduated in engineering thereby specializing in aeronautics. She received the PhD title in 1929 and derived two years later the Lotz-Method for calculating the distribution of pressure in aircraft wings of different shapes. Later, she took interest in automatic flight control of aircraft, notably of the discontinuous or the "on-off" type. By 1928, Flügge-Lotz headed the Department of Theoretical Aerodynamics, of Aerodynamische Versuchsanstalt AVA, at Göttingen University. She was also a consultant for Deutsche Versuchsanstalt für Luftfahrt in Berlin-Adlerhorst from 1938-1945. However, she and her husband Flügge felt themselves increasingly discriminated by the Nazi regime. In 1948 they emigrated to the USA where Flügge was offered a professorship in engineering, whereas his wife got the first woman full professorship in the Engineering Department at Stanford University. She extended her work to automatic flight control and to the guidance of rockets and missiles, earning herself the description "a female Wernher von Braun".

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Flügge-Lotz was awarded the Women Engineers Achievements Award in 1970, and she was a Fellow of the Institution of Aeronautics and Astronautics. She delivered the von Karman Lecture on Trends in the field of automatic control in the last two decades in 1972 during the AIAA Annual Meeting in Washington DC. A Wilhelm Flügge and Irmgard Flügge-Lotz Memorial Award was installed by the Applied Mechanical Division of Stanford University.

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_{Anonymous (1964). Irmgard Flügge-Lotz. Who's who in engineering: A biographical dictionary of contemporaries 9: 594. Lewis: New York.}

_{Anonymous (1972). von Karman Lecture by Flügge-Lotz well received. Astronautics and Aeronautics 10(6): 74. P}

_{Anonymous (1974). Irmgard Flügge-Lotz. Astronautics and Aeronautics 12(7/8): 77. Anonymous (1996). Flügge-Lotz, Irmgard. Biographical dictionary of the history of technol- ogy: 263, L. Day, I. McNeil, eds. Routledge: London.}

_{Flügge-Lotz, I. (1968). Discontinuous and optimal control. McGraw Hill: New York.}

_{Lotz, I. (1936). Beeinflussung der Auftriebsverteilung durch den Schraubenstrahl. Jahrbuch}

_{Lilienthal-Gesellschaft für Luftfahrtforschung: 57-74.}

_{Poggendorff, J.C. (2002). Flügge-Lotz, Irmgard Wilhelmine Dorette. Biographisch-Literarisches Handwörterbuch 7b: 1431-1432; 8: 1225-1227. Akademie-Verlag. Berlin.}