Inge Lehmann was born in 1888, in the city of Copenhagen in Denmark. She attended an equal opportunities school, where she excelled in mathematics. Inge attended the University of Copenhagen and Cambridge, but struggled with some ill health and eventually completed her degree at the age of 32. She started her career as an actuarial assistant, which is a specialised role calculating statistics for the insurance industry.
Inge worked with a professor at the University of Copenhagen, and later with the head of the Royal Danish Geodetic Institute. Geodetics is the science of measuring the Earth, and Inge developed a passion for the subject. She supervised the installation of seismological stations in Copenhagen and Iceland, which was part of the Kingdom of Denmark at the time, and she collected and processed the data. Two years later, she attended the meeting of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics in Prague, where she learned that seismologists were experiencing problems due to inconsistencies between seismic stations, which affected the accuracy of their calculations. She immediately went back to university to study seismology and geodesy.
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