Emmy Noether — mathematician
Born: March 23rd, 1882, Erlangen, Germany
Died: Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, April 14, 1935
I just bought a Kindle copy of the book about Emmy Noether called “Einstein’s Tutor” written by Lee Phillips. So far, I’ve only read the first chapter. It makes the case that Noether should be as well-known as Einstein, Schrodinger, Dirac, and Heisenberg.
In a letter to the New York Times, Albert Einstein wrote of Emmy Noether:
“In the judgment of the most competent living mathematicians, Fräulein Noether was the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began. In the realm of algebra, in which the most gifted mathematicians have been busy for centuries, she discovered methods which have proved of enormous importance in the development of the present-day younger generation of mathematicians.”
I’m pretty sure I cannot do better than Einstein in my description of her talent and achievements.
Amalie Emmy Noether was born into a Jewish family. Her father was the mathematician Max Noether who taught at the University of Erlangen. She was initially forbidden to study at the university because of her sex but she eventually managed to study mathematics, obtaining her degree, and subsequently she also obtained her doctorate in 1907, with a dissertation on algebraic invariants.
She worked without pay at the Mathematical Institute or Erlangen until 1915 when she was invited by David Hilbert and Felix Klein to join the mathematics department at the University of Göttingen, a world-renowned center of mathematical research. Although her appointment was strongly opposed because she was a female, Hilbert arranged for her to lecture under his name for her first four years, again unpaid.
At the University of Göttingen Hilbert and Klien asked Emmy to look into the mathematics of Einstein’s recently published paper on General Relativity. They suspected that his theory defied the conservation of energy principle, a cornerstone of Physics. Noether showed them that this was not the case because Einstein’s mathematics obeyed time-reversal symmetry and thus energy must be conserved. While this is a simplification of her finding, she had discovered a more general law now called Noether’s Theorem, that for every conserved quantity in Physics, there existed a related symmetry of the law governing that quantity. This law explains the conservation of energy, of momentum, of angular momentum, and a whole host of the conservations found in elementary particle theory and beyond. It is difficult to explain to the non-physicist just how earth shattering and important this finding by Emmy Noether was and is.
Her next venture into the world of mathematics saw her delve into the abstract algebra theories of groups, rings, fields, and ideals. I admit that my understanding of these topics is tenuous at best, but I can report that for mathematicians Noether is best remembered for her developments in the field of abstract algebra rather than her theorem.
In 1933 the National Socialists (NAZIs) came to power and Jewish professors were dismissed from their posts. Noether, like many others, looked for positions abroad. Noether was offered a position at Somerville College, Oxford, UK but chose instead to take up a position at Bryn Mawr College, near to Princeton and its Institute for Advanced Study, where other leading lights in science and mathematics found refuge from the NAZIs. She lectured frequently at the Institute for Advanced Study. She is reported to have remarked of Princeton, that she was not welcome at “the men’s university, where nothing female is admitted”.
Sadly, her days in the safety of the United States were numbered. In 1935 she died from complications to remove an ovarian cyst. She is well remembered in the fields of mathematics and advanced physics where her influence still exists, but she is not well known by the public at large, certainly not as well-known as Albert Einstein who maybe had a better PR organization.
To find out more about Emmy try these links: