Emmy Noether
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| Emmy Noether |
|---|
| Born |
| 23 March 1882 Erlangen, Germany |
Amalie Nöther (March 23 1882 – April 14 1935) was a talented German-born mathematician of the early 20th century, with penetrating insights that she used to develop elegant abstractions which she formalized and published. She is almost universally known as Emmy Noether.
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Biography
She was born in Erlangen, Bavaria, Germany. Her father, Max Noether, was a distinguished mathematician and a professor at Erlangen. 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, Noether was able to audit classes. When Erlangen permitted women to enroll in 1904, Noether immediately enrolled as a mathematics student. She received her doctorate in 1907 under Paul Gordan, and she rapidly 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 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; but rather stated, "Max Nöther was the father of Emmy Nöther. Emmy is the origin of coordinates in the Nöther family."
As a Jew, Noether needed to flee Nazi Germany in 1933 and she joined the faculty at Bryn Mawr college in the United States. She died at Bryn Mawr on 14 April 1935 under 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, not even her department head at the college. She perished during or shortly after the surgery. Nöther was never married, and she didn't have any relatives in the U.S., either. Nöther 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 Artin and Hasse, she founded the theory of central simple algebras.
See also
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.
External links
- Template:MathGenealogy
- Template:MacTutor Biography
- Joint biography with Sophia Kovalevsky: Kovalevsky and Noether
- UCLA page about Emmy Noetherca:Emmy Noether
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