Background
She was born in Samara, Russian Empire, but her father"s job as a representative with a Russian sugar company moved the family to Harbin, China in 1910.
She was born in Samara, Russian Empire, but her father"s job as a representative with a Russian sugar company moved the family to Harbin, China in 1910.
She preferred to deal with complex number fields and integers, rather than the more abstract aspects of the theory. Emma was tutored at home until the age of 14, when a school was opened locally. She managed to make her way to the United States of America for her higher education.
At University of California Berkeley, she started out in engineering in 1924, but found her niche in mathematics.
One of her professors was Derrick North. Lehmer, the number theorist well known for his work on prime number tables and factorizations. Upon her graduation summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics (1928), Emma married the younger They moved to Brown University, where Emma received her Master of Science, and Derrick his Doctor of Philosophy, both in 1930.
Emma did not obtain a Doctor of Philosophy herself. The Lehmers had two children, Laura (1932) and Donald (1934).
Emma did independent mathematical work, including a translation from Russian to English of Pontryagin"s book Topological Groups.
Her publications were mainly in number theory and computation, with emphasis on reciprocity laws, special primes, and congruences.