Scientist of the Day - Emmy Noether

Portrait of Emmy Noether as a young woman, photograph, ca 1900 (Wikimedia commons)

​Amalie Emmy Noether, a German mathematician, died Apr. 14, 1935, at the age of 53. She is often called the greatest woman mathematician of the 20th century, and many would remove the time constraint on that description. She was born on Mar. 23, 1882, in Erlangen in Bavaria, where her father taught math at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, and she received her PhD there in 1909.  She then taught at Erlangen for 9 years, unpaid and unlisted as a faculty member.  She had spent a postgrad year at Göttingen in 1903-04, which was home to the finest school of math in Europe, headed up by David Hilbert and Felix Klein.  Apparently they remembered young Emmy in a good way, and they invited her to come to Gottingen in 1916. The non-mathematical faculty objected to her even being there, as a woman, but Hilbert protected Noether and ensured that she was able to get her habilitation, a tenured professorship, in 1919. At first, she was not allowed to teach under her own name, and had to teach Hilbert's classes, but she gradually acquired students who recognized her brilliance and wanted her as a mentor.

It is difficult to describe Noether's work in math to a general audience, since I don't really understand it, nor do many people who are not professional mathematicians. I know that she made an important contribution to physics with her discovery that every symmetry law in physics is associated with a conservation law, such as the conservation of angular momentum, which was a boon to physicists everywhere. Within mathematics, she is noted for her work in abstract algebra, and in the theory of groups and rings.

Portrait of Emmy Noether as a mature woman, undated photograph (cdn.britannica.com)

A hostile academic environment was slowly becoming less prickly for Noether when, in 1933, Hitler issued the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, which we discussed in a post just one week ago.  Noether, being Jewish, lost her job in Göttingen, and had to look for work elsewhere. She thought about moving to Russia, but in the end, she accepted an offer to teach at Bryn Mawr in Pennsylvania, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.  She moved there in 1933 and found the atmosphere in the U.S. welcome and congenial.

Unfortunately, Noether's American academic career never blossomed the way it should have. In 1935, she had an operation to remove a large ovarian cyst, and although the operation was successful, her body temperature spiraled out of control, and she died 4 days later. No one knows what happened.  The only thing known for certain is that the most brilliant woman mathematician of the century, who had finally come to rest in greener pastures, was taken from the world, before she could fulfill the promising future that should have lain ahead of her.

Cloister of the Old Library at Bryn Mawr College, where Emmy Noether’s ashes were strewn in 1935 (Wikimedia commons)

Emmy Noether was cremated and her ashes were strewn under the cloister of the Old Library at Bryn Mawr. I do not know if there is a plaque there describing her career or the presence of her ashes.

William B. Ashworth, Jr., Consultant for the History of Science, Linda Hall Library and Associate Professor emeritus, Department of History, University of Missouri-Kansas City. Comments or corrections are welcome; please direct to ashworthw@umkc.edu.