Roswitha Blind

Roswitha Blind (also published as Roswitha Hammer)^[1][2] is a German mathematician, specializing in convex geometry, discrete geometry, and polyhedral combinatorics, and a politician and organizer for the Social Democratic Party of Germany in Stuttgart.

Mathematics

As Roswitha Hammer, Blind completed a Ph.D. in 1974 at the University of Stuttgart. Her dissertation, Über konvexe Strukturen und die Beziehungen zur elementaren Konvexität, concerned convex geometry and discrete geometry and was supervised by Kurt Leichtweiss.^[2]

She is best known in mathematics for a 1987 publication with Peter Mani-Levitska in which, solving a conjecture of Micha Perles, she and Mani-Levitska proved that the combinatorial structure of simple polytopes is completely determined by their graphs.^[3] This result has been called the Blind–Mani theorem^[4] or the Perles–Blind–Mani theorem.^[5]

In a 1979 publication,^[6] she introduced a class of convex polytopes sometimes called the Blind polytopes, generalizing the semiregular polytopes and Johnson solids, in which all faces are regular polytopes.^[7]

Politics

Blind became a city councillor in the Möhringen-Vaihingen district of Stuttgart in 2004,^[8] stepping down from that seat in 2009 in order to become chair of the Social Democratic Party of Germany local council group.^[9] As councillor, in order to better serve the youth of her district, she became chair of a local football club, 1. FC Lauchhau-Lauchäcker, in 2006, also serving as president of the Stuttgart Sports Forum.^[10]

She retired from politics in 2014,^[8] and from her position with the football club in 2016.^[10]