Olga Taussky-Todd called herself a “torchbearer for matrix theory.” Her subject originated in the mid-nineteenth century, remaining a province of mathematicians until physicists reinvented it in the 1920s to interpret quantum mechanics. Her work and passion helped shape matrix theory and draw other talented mathematicians to its development. A century after its inception, matrix theory joined calculus as an essential component of a scientist’s education.

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In 1947, her husband received a year’s appointment at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington. The matrix theorists assembled there and stirrings of the embryonic computer revolution made the offer appealing. Both were hired, traveling to America on a Liberty ship with a hundred war brides. They remained until 1957, when they were lured to the California Institute of Technology, Todd to be a professor of mathematics, and Taussky-Todd to be a research associate. She received tenure in 1963, but had to wait until 1971 for a professorial appointment, well after she had become internationally known. She published two hundred papers in her lifetime, most during her fertile thirty-eight years at Cal Tech, where she guided fourteen doctoral students.

Among her many honors and awards were the Los Angeles Times Woman of the Year (1963) and the Mathematical Association of America’s Ford Prize (1970). She served on the councils of both the London and the American Mathematical Societies, and was vice president of the latter in 1986–1987. Both the journals Linear Algebra and its Applications and Linear and Multilinear Algebra published issues dedicated to her.

Taussky-Todd was visiting professor at the University of Vienna in 1965, accepted the Austrian government’s Cross of Honor in Science and Art in 1980, and later became a corresponding member of the Austrian and the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. Historians and others puzzle over the warm feelings some Austrian Jews, Taussky-Todd among them, retained for their country of origin in the face of Austria’s long tradition of virulent antisemitism. Her writings ascribe her career difficulties to academe’s prejudice against women, not to antisemitism. Though of Jewish birth, she identified herself with an international intellectual community, not a specifically Jewish one.

Olga Taussky-Todd died on October 7, 1995, in Pasadena, California, survived by her husband of fifty-seven years.

“An Autobiographical Essay.” In Mathematical People: Profiles and Interviews, edited by Donald J. Albers and G.L. Alexanderson (1985).

“How I Became a Torchbearer for Matrix Theory.” American Mathematics Monthly 95 (1988): 801–812.