Marie Torhorst (28 December 1888 – 7 May 1989) was a German school teacher and political activist who became an East German politician. She served as Minister for People's Education in the state of Thuringia between 1947 and 1950. Some sources identify her as "the first-ever female minister (on state or national level) in the history of Germany". Others are content to record that, within Germany, she was the first-ever female minister in the state of Thuringia. Marie Torhorst stated and proved what is today known as the Carathéodory-Torhorst theorem in her 1918 doctoral dissertation. The dissertation was subsequently lost and Torhorst's contribution was for many decades overlooked; but in the twenty-first century mathematics scholars are happy to acknowledge and celebrate her work.
Life
Provenance Marie Torhorst was born at the end of the so-called "Year of the Three Emperors" in Ledde, then as now a sleepy village in the flat countryside west of Osnabrück. She was the seventh and youngest child of Arnold Torhorst (1841–1909), the local parson and his wife, born Luise Smend (1847–1923). The family seems to have been intellectually gifted. Marie's elder sister, Adelheid, would also achieve a measure of eminence in teaching and, after 1945, in politics. The sisters would later, jointly, have a secondary school named after them. Luise Torhorst had inherited a useful sum of money as a result of which she was able to see to it that not just her four sons, but also her three daughters, received a full education. Marie completed her own schooling at an "Oberlyzeum" (single-sex girls' secondary school).
Student Sources are not completely consistent as to when she embarked on her university education, much of which coincided with the First World War. She attended the University of Bonn, studying Geography, Mathematics and Physics. There are at least two reference to her having also studied at the University of Göttingen.It was from Bonn that in 1918 she received her doctorate: the work was supervised by Hans Hahn. Her dissertation was entitled "Über die Randmenge einfach-zusammenhängender ebener Gebiete": a core conclusion has become known among her scholarly admirers as the Carathéodory-Torhorst theorem or, more simply, as the Torhorst theorem. It might have been thought that her doctorate should have provided a launch pad for a life-long career in the universities sector. There were still vanishingly few women working in high-level academic research at this time, however, and at least one commentator has identified "a lack of confidence in her own mathematical ability" in her autobiography. Also, with Germany economically, militarily and politically broken and on the brink of a year of revolutions in the ports and industrial centres, there was widespread nervousness that Lenin's so-called October Revolution might yet spread uncontrollably through the European continent. Marie Torhorst's own student record of left-wing political activism was no secret. She joined the socialist "Studenten-Arbeitsgemeinschaft" (apparently an umbrella group of socialist student associations) in 1917. According to one source she passed the exams necessary to qualify her for teaching in state schools in 1919 and 1920. Elsewhere it is indicated that she had already attended the "Stift Keppel" in Allenbach, where she successfully completed a two years teacher-training course in her early 20s, between 1903 and 1905. During the early twentieth century her political record made it hard for her to find a permanent teaching post. She was able to find a part-time teaching position at a Catholic girls' school in Bonn, however, and also found work with the university as a university librarian. It was probably in 1922/23 that she completed several terms of study at the "Handelshochschule" (loosely, "business college", at the time being subsumed into the university) in Cologne, studying business administration and economics, following which she received a qualification in teaching business studies.
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