April 14: Emmy Noether, Mathematical Genius

Amalie (Emmy) Noether, whom Albert Einstein described as “the most significant mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began,” died on this date in 1935 at age 53, after surgery for ovarian cysts. Noether was a German Jew who completed her dissertation in 1907 and worked in academia for seven years without pay before gaining a position at the University of Göttingen, where she remained until the Nazis dismissed Jews from all university positions in 1933. By then she had achieved international fame for her work in algebra and other mathematical fields, though her career was constantly plagued by institutional sexism. Noether moved to the U.S. in 1933 and taught at Bryn Mawr; in 1934, she began lecturing at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, but spoke of Princeton as a “men’s university, where nothing female is admitted.” Noether’s Theorem, which shows that “a conservation law is associated with any differentiable symmetry of a physical system,” has been described by American physicists Leon Lederman and Christopher Hill as “certainly one of the most important mathematical theorems ever proved in guiding the development of modern physics, possibly on a par with the Pythagorean theorem.” “She taught us to think in simple, and thus general, terms . . . and not in complicated algebraic calculations,” said her colleague P.S. Alexandroff during her memorial service. “In this way, she cleared a path toward the discovery of new algebraic patterns that had previously been obscured.” “Known primarily for her profound and beautiful theorems in ring theory, Emmy Noether’s most significant achievement runs deeper: she changed the way mathematicians think about their subject.” —The Association for Women in Mathematics