ABSTRACT
Barbara Burks's productive career was cut short by an untimely self-inflicted death. In 1927, Burks had married Herman Ramsperger, a promising young chemist with an appointment at Stanford University and later at the California Institute of Technology. By the time of the United States' involvement in the Second World War, Max Wertheimer had been in America for more than eight years but had not changed his lifestyle appreciably. His disposition, teaching style, writing habits, and daily activities remained largely unaltered after his immigration. In 1926 Karl Duncker's thesis, "A Qualitative Experimental and Theoretical Study of Productive Thinking," appeared in the Pedagogical Seminary. Overall, Duncker's work on thinking is an amalgam of Wertheimer's theory of productive thinking and Gestalt logic and of Wolfgang Kohler's and Wertheimer's work on insight. William Stern developed what she called "Structural Arithmetic," an education program based largely on Wertheimer's ideas about productive thinking.
