What is Emmy Noether?

Amalie Emmy Noether^[1] (March 23 1882 – April 14 1935) was a German-born Jewish mathematician, said by Einstein in eulogy to be "[i]n the judgment of the most competent living mathematicians, [...] the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began."^[2] Almost universally known as Emmy Noether, she had penetrating insights that she used to develop elegant abstractions.

Biography

She was born in Erlangen, Bavaria, Germany. Her father, Max Noether, was a distinguished mathematician and a professor at Erlangen. Fritz Noether was her younger brother, and the statistician Gottfried E. Noether was her nephew.^[3]

Noether 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 sit in various classes. When Erlangen finally permitted women to enroll in 1904, Emmy immediately enrolled as a mathematics student. She received her doctorate in 1907 under Paul Gordan, and she quickly built a reputation from her publications. She moved to Göttingen, Germany in 1915, but the University of Göttingen refused to let her teach. Her sympathetic colleague, David Hilbert, advertised her courses in the university's schedule under his own name. A 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 have a vote in the academic senate. Said Prof. Hilbert, "I do not see that the sex of the candidate is an argument against her admission as a Privatdozent. After all, the university senate is not a bathhouse."^[4] She was finally admitted to the faculty in the year 1919. Edmund Landau declined to describe her as the daughter of Max Noether; but rather stated, "Max Noether was the father of Emmy Noether. Emmy is the origin of coordinates in the Noether family."

Emmy fled Germany in 1933; she had been forbidden from teaching undergraduate classes by the Nazi racial laws. She joined the faculty at Bryn Mawr College in the United States. She died at Bryn Mawr on 14 April 1935 in mysterious circumstances. Her doctor told her that she needed an operation, and she scheduled it during a college break at Bryn Mawr, without telling anyone. She perished during or shortly after the surgery. Emmy never married, and she had no relatives in the USA. Emmy 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 he was shot there for anti-Soviet propaganda at Orel on Sept. 10th, 1941.

Mathematical work

• Noether's theorem is a central result in theoretical physics that expresses the one-to-one correspondence between symmetries and conservation laws.
• The Lasker–Noether theorem in commutative algebra is a fundamental result that describes the decomposition of ideals into primary ideals.
• Noetherian rings are those such that every ideal is finitely generated.
• Along with Emil Artin and Helmut Hasse, she founded the theory of central simple algebras.

See also

• Noether isomorphism theorems
• Noether's theorem

Notes

Important publications

• Emmy Noether, Abstrakter Aufbau der Idealtheorie in algebraischen Zahl- und Funktionenkörpern, Mathematische Annalen 96 (1927) p. 26-61

References

• Brewer, James W.; Martha K. Smith (eds.) (c1981). Emmy Noether : a tribute to her life and work. New York: Marcel Dekker. ISBN 0-8247-1550-0.  http://catalog.loc.gov/
• Dick, Auguste (1981). Emmy Noether, 1882-1935, H. I. Blocher (trans.), Boston: Birkhäuser. ISBN 3-7643-3019-8.  http://catalog.loc.gov/ (About the author (German))
• Einstein, Albert. "Emmy Noether: Professor Einstein Writes in Appreciation of a Fellow-Mathematician", New York Times, May 5, 1935. 
• Kimberling, Clark, "Emmy Noether," American Mathematical Monthly 79 (1972) 136-149. Addendum, 79 (1972) 755.
• Noether, Gottfried E. (1987), "Emmy Noether (1882-1935)", in Louise S. Grinstein and Paul J. Campbell, Women of mathematics : a biobibliographic sourcebook, with a foreword by Alice Schafer, New York: Greenwood Press, ISBN 0-313-24849-4 http://catalog.loc.gov/
• Reid, Constance (1996). Hilbert. New York: Springer. ISBN 0-387-94674-8. 

External links

• Emmy Noether at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
• O'Connor, John J; Edmund F. Robertson "Emmy Noether". MacTutor History of Mathematics archive.  
• Emmy Noether, Mandie Taylor, in: Biographies of Women Mathematicians, Agnes Scott College
• Joint biography with Sophia Kovalevsky: Kovalevsky and Noether
• UCLA page about Emmy Noether
• Eric W. Weisstein, Noether, Emmy (1882-1935) at ScienceWorld.
• Emmy Noether (1882-1935) - Lebensläufe (German) Application for admission to the University of Erlangen and three curricula vitae, two of which are shown in handwriting, with transcriptions. The first of these is in Emmy Noether's own handwriting.
• The Life and Times of Emmy Noether Nina Byers, Physics Department, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA 90024, (November 11, 1994)
• Two versions of her 1908 doctoral dissertation completed at Erlangen. The second is the published version. http://dz-srv1.sub.uni-goettingen.de/sub/digbib/loader?ht=VIEW&did=D39728 http://dz-srv1.sub.uni-goettingen.de/sub/digbib/loader?ht=VIEW&did=D261200 (German)
• Clark Kimberling, Emmy Noether, Mentors & Colleagues