Abstract:

The first steps in Physics in Argentine Universities, at the beginning of the XXth century, were carried out by distinguished European scientists. Among them, Mrs Margrete Heiberg Bose, the first woman to obtain a doctor's degree in chemistry in her native Denmark. Born in 1865, she studied in Denmark and Germany, and worked as a researcher in Götingen and Danzig until 1909, when she was hired, together with her husband the German physicist Emil Bose, to start the Physics Institute of the newly created National University of La Plata. She collaborated in the organisation of the Institute and devoted to teaching Experimental Physics, developing the first course of this type in Argentina. Working on her own or in collaboration with remarkable contemporary physicists, so respectable as Walter Nerst, Emil Bose and Richard Gans, she published papers on inorganic chemistry and physical chemistry in prestigious scientific magazines of the time. The complex institutional situation together with local politics, the opposition to her feministic and socialistic ideas, and the sequels of an anti-Germanic post-war atmosphere made her work difficult at La Plata University. From 1912, and until her death in 1952, she devoted her works to teaching and divulgation of science