Christine Ladd-Franklin


Ladd-Franklin, Christine,

1847–1930, American scientist, b. Windsor, Conn., grad. Vassar 1869. She was the first woman student to enter Johns Hopkins (1878), her special studies being directed toward logic and the theory of color. She studied in Göttingen (1891–92) and worked in Helmholtz's laboratory, developing the theory of color vision that bears her name and that is described in Colour and Colour Theories (1929), a collection of her papers.

Ladd-Franklin, Christine

(1847–1930) psychologist, logician; born in Windsor, Conn. She studied mathematics at Johns Hopkins University, where she married faculty member Fabian Franklin (1882). In 1883 she proposed the "antilogism," a syllogism concluding that if any two premises are true, the third must be false. Her experiments in psychological optics began in 1886, and she presented her theory of color vision to the International Congress of Psychologists in London in 1892. She taught at Columbia University from 1910 to 1930.