Emmy Noether (born Nöther) (March 23, 1882 – April 14, 1935) was one of the most talented mathematicians of the early 20th century, with penetrating insights that she used to develop elegant abstractions which she formalized beautifully.
She was born Amalie Nöther in Erlangen, Bavaria, Germany. Her father, Max Noether, was a distinguished mathematician and a professor at Erlangen.
Emmy did not show any early precocity at mathematics — as a teenager she was more interested in music and dancing.
Although Erlangen did not allow women to enroll, Emmy was able to audit classes. When Erlangen permitted women to enroll in 1904, Emmy enrolled as a mathematics student. She received her doctorate in 1907 under Paul Gordan, and rapidly built a world-wide reputation. She went to Göttingen in 1915, but the University of Göttingen refused to let her teach, and her colleague, David Hilbert, had to advertise her courses in the university's prospectus under his own name. A long controversy ensued, with her opponents asking what the country's soldiers would think when they returned home and were expected to learn at the feet of a woman. Allowing her on the faculty would also mean letting her vote in the academic senate. Said Hilbert, "I do not see that the sex of the candidate is against her admission as a Privatdozent. After all, the university senate is not a bathhouse." She was finally admitted to the faculty in 1919.
Edmund Landau declined to describe her as the daughter of Max Nöther; rather "Max Nöther was the father of Emmy Nöther. Emmy is the origin of coordinates in the Nöther family."
As a Jew, Nöther was forced to flee Nazi Germany in 1933 and joined the faculty at Bryn Mawr in the United States. She died at Bryn Mawr in 1935 and was buried in The Cloisters of Thomas Great Hall on the Bryn Mawr Campus. Her younger brother, the German mathematician Fritz Noether, fled Germany during the Nazi rule into the Soviet Union in 1934 and was shot there for anti-soviet propaganda at Orel on Sept. 10th, 1941.
During the last quarter of the 20th century, Noether's Theorem evolved into a basic pillar of the mathematical foundations of physics. Some authors even propose that all education in theoretical physics should start with an introduction to Noether's Theorem.
Important publications
- Emmy Noether, Abstrakter Aufbau der Idealtheorie in algebraischen Zahl- und Funktionenkörpern, Mathematische Annalen 96 (1927) p. 26-61
References
- Gottfried E. Noether, "Emmy Noether (1882-1935)," in Louise S. Grinstein and Paul J. Campbell: Women of Mathematics: A Bibliographic Sourcebook (New York, Greenwood Press), 1987, pp. 165-170.
- Dick, Auguste. 1981. Emmy Noether 1882-1935. Translated by H.I. Blocher. Boston: Birkhauser.
- Brewer, James, and Smith, Martha (eds.). 1981. Emmy Noether: A Tribute to Her Life and Work. New York: Marcel Dekker.
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