This is something I wanted to try after askaninjask's thread about "math duels". I thought of making a thread based on somebody's birth or death, and out of all the people who were born or died in March, I picked this woman. Actually, I might have picked Cantor, but it was too late for that, so here we are. In fact, it's all but too late for this, though I tried to post it earlier :(
Today is the birthday of Emmy Noether. She was kind of a big deal, though perhaps most haven't heard of her. She was instrumental in modernizing algebra into what it is today, and physicists know her for one of the most foundational theorems in modern physics. Yet, being a Jewish female pacifist intellectual in early 20th century Germany... yeah, she had a real uphill battle in front of her. Fortunately, her father, Max Noether, was a mathematician, and she worked with titans like Felix Klein and David Hilbert, who had her back when things went sour.
Amalie Emmy Noether was born in Erlangen, Bavaria, Germany, on March 23, 1882, to mathematician Max Noether and Amalia Kaufmann. She had three younger brothers: Albert, who got a doctorate in chemistry, Fritz, who went into applied math (and who himself fathered statistician Gottfried E. Noether), and Gustav. Despite this background, she had the typical upbringing of most girls of that time. She showed proficiency in English and French and went on to become a language teacher. Wait, no, that last part didn't happen, because she wanted to study at the University. I wonder how that happened...
As a female academic, she encountered much opposition. In university, Noether could only audit classes and get permission to sit in on lectures. She graduated and spent a year in Göttingen, then went back to Erlangen, where she lectured without pay, sometimes substituting for her father. From 1913 to 1916, she expanded and applied work done by David Hilbert, the beginning of what is called the first epoch of her contributions. Yeah, she did so much shit it had to be divided into three time periods. Seriously, look at the contributions section in her Wikipedia page. It just goes on and on and on.
In 1915, Hilbert and Klein noticed that this Emmy Noether character was pretty awesome and tried to recruit her back to Göttingen. The other Göttingen people did not like that at all, the philosophy faculty in particular. "What will our soldiers think when they return to the university and find that they are required to learn at the feet of a woman?" Hilbert's response?
"I do not see that the sex of the candidate is an argument against her admission as privatdozent. After all, we are a university, not a bath house."
That's just how he rolls. This got her... an unofficial position where she taught under Hilbert's name. During that time, she proved *that* theorem and published it in 1918. Meanwhile, the German revolution after World War I resulted in more rights for women, allowing Noether to further her career.
So what is this "Noether's theorem", exactly? Wikipedia says:
"If a system has a continuous symmetry property, then there are corresponding quantities whose values are conserved in time."
The most obvious example is that a physical system whose behaviour is independent of position is bound to the law of conservation of momentum. Similarly, a closed system (that is, one that does not experience outside forces) exhibits the same behaviour regardless of time, so it follows the law of conservation of energy. A system of objects rotating around another object behaves the same regardless of how the system is oriented in space, so it follows conservation of angular momentum. Now, that much was actually already well-known by the 20th century. The real power of this theorem is that analogous statements can be made about any physical system that can be described by what is called a "Lagrangian function". Finding quantities that don't change is huge, as you could probably appreciate if you tried to solve any problem about more than the interaction of two or more objects.
So that's the theorem that still didn't get its publisher a paid teaching position for a year, a theorem that still shapes physics today, with people looking for symmetries in new scientific frontiers. Of course, there is also Noether's revolutionary work in algebra. I don't think I could pinpoint one contribution like with the theorem in physics, because really the work was in developing a branch of math rather than in one result.
Various sources portray Noether as someone with deep insight and enthusiasm of math. She spoke quickly and eschewed lesson plans for spontaneous discussion, which caused people to have trouble following along. This meant that she would end up forming a posse of dedicated students who appreciated her style. She was also said to be quite considerate, helpful and selfless, to the point that she would sometimes let others take credit for her ideas to foster their careers. She also apparently didn't care much about appearance or manners, as there are accounts of her spilling food, gesticulating wildly, and ignoring her hair as it went into disarray. I guess she just didn't want to waste time doing other things when she could be talking about math.
In 1928, Noether spent a year in the Soviet Union and expressed her support for that state. Now, remember, this was the 1920s; the Soviet Union was still young, Stalin hadn't happened yet, and math and science were flourishing in the Soviet Union. This political position added to the trouble that she was receiving in Germany for being a Jewish woman. The highest point in her career was probably in November 1932, when she delivered a plenary address at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Zürich. After that, the Nazis really took hold and Jews were fired from civil service positions. Noether was one of many Jewish intellectuals who eventually had to flee to America, landing a job at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, where she finally escaped the sausage-fest that was every other institution she went to.
In April 1935, Noether underwent surgery for an ovarian cyst, but she died four days later, on April 14, 1935, apparently due to an infection.
So that's the story of one of the greatest intellects of the 20th century. She clearly loved math and wanted to share that love with others, even to her detriment. In a world that grew to hate her more and more, she could have hated it back, but instead she just lived through it and showed more concern for her students and colleagues than herself. Even when she was being paid, she lived modestly. She is evidence that the growth of humanity doesn't have to rely on competition between huge egos. Her success flies in the face of the "traditional" view of women at the time, which persisted for decades after the death of her and other women like Marie Curie and Lise Meitner, and still somewhat persists today.
Today is the birthday of Emmy Noether. She was kind of a big deal, though perhaps most haven't heard of her. She was instrumental in modernizing algebra into what it is today, and physicists know her for one of the most foundational theorems in modern physics. Yet, being a Jewish female pacifist intellectual in early 20th century Germany... yeah, she had a real uphill battle in front of her. Fortunately, her father, Max Noether, was a mathematician, and she worked with titans like Felix Klein and David Hilbert, who had her back when things went sour.
Amalie Emmy Noether was born in Erlangen, Bavaria, Germany, on March 23, 1882, to mathematician Max Noether and Amalia Kaufmann. She had three younger brothers: Albert, who got a doctorate in chemistry, Fritz, who went into applied math (and who himself fathered statistician Gottfried E. Noether), and Gustav. Despite this background, she had the typical upbringing of most girls of that time. She showed proficiency in English and French and went on to become a language teacher. Wait, no, that last part didn't happen, because she wanted to study at the University. I wonder how that happened...
As a female academic, she encountered much opposition. In university, Noether could only audit classes and get permission to sit in on lectures. She graduated and spent a year in Göttingen, then went back to Erlangen, where she lectured without pay, sometimes substituting for her father. From 1913 to 1916, she expanded and applied work done by David Hilbert, the beginning of what is called the first epoch of her contributions. Yeah, she did so much shit it had to be divided into three time periods. Seriously, look at the contributions section in her Wikipedia page. It just goes on and on and on.
In 1915, Hilbert and Klein noticed that this Emmy Noether character was pretty awesome and tried to recruit her back to Göttingen. The other Göttingen people did not like that at all, the philosophy faculty in particular. "What will our soldiers think when they return to the university and find that they are required to learn at the feet of a woman?" Hilbert's response?
"I do not see that the sex of the candidate is an argument against her admission as privatdozent. After all, we are a university, not a bath house."
That's just how he rolls. This got her... an unofficial position where she taught under Hilbert's name. During that time, she proved *that* theorem and published it in 1918. Meanwhile, the German revolution after World War I resulted in more rights for women, allowing Noether to further her career.
So what is this "Noether's theorem", exactly? Wikipedia says:
"If a system has a continuous symmetry property, then there are corresponding quantities whose values are conserved in time."
The most obvious example is that a physical system whose behaviour is independent of position is bound to the law of conservation of momentum. Similarly, a closed system (that is, one that does not experience outside forces) exhibits the same behaviour regardless of time, so it follows the law of conservation of energy. A system of objects rotating around another object behaves the same regardless of how the system is oriented in space, so it follows conservation of angular momentum. Now, that much was actually already well-known by the 20th century. The real power of this theorem is that analogous statements can be made about any physical system that can be described by what is called a "Lagrangian function". Finding quantities that don't change is huge, as you could probably appreciate if you tried to solve any problem about more than the interaction of two or more objects.
So that's the theorem that still didn't get its publisher a paid teaching position for a year, a theorem that still shapes physics today, with people looking for symmetries in new scientific frontiers. Of course, there is also Noether's revolutionary work in algebra. I don't think I could pinpoint one contribution like with the theorem in physics, because really the work was in developing a branch of math rather than in one result.
Various sources portray Noether as someone with deep insight and enthusiasm of math. She spoke quickly and eschewed lesson plans for spontaneous discussion, which caused people to have trouble following along. This meant that she would end up forming a posse of dedicated students who appreciated her style. She was also said to be quite considerate, helpful and selfless, to the point that she would sometimes let others take credit for her ideas to foster their careers. She also apparently didn't care much about appearance or manners, as there are accounts of her spilling food, gesticulating wildly, and ignoring her hair as it went into disarray. I guess she just didn't want to waste time doing other things when she could be talking about math.
In 1928, Noether spent a year in the Soviet Union and expressed her support for that state. Now, remember, this was the 1920s; the Soviet Union was still young, Stalin hadn't happened yet, and math and science were flourishing in the Soviet Union. This political position added to the trouble that she was receiving in Germany for being a Jewish woman. The highest point in her career was probably in November 1932, when she delivered a plenary address at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Zürich. After that, the Nazis really took hold and Jews were fired from civil service positions. Noether was one of many Jewish intellectuals who eventually had to flee to America, landing a job at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, where she finally escaped the sausage-fest that was every other institution she went to.
In April 1935, Noether underwent surgery for an ovarian cyst, but she died four days later, on April 14, 1935, apparently due to an infection.
So that's the story of one of the greatest intellects of the 20th century. She clearly loved math and wanted to share that love with others, even to her detriment. In a world that grew to hate her more and more, she could have hated it back, but instead she just lived through it and showed more concern for her students and colleagues than herself. Even when she was being paid, she lived modestly. She is evidence that the growth of humanity doesn't have to rely on competition between huge egos. Her success flies in the face of the "traditional" view of women at the time, which persisted for decades after the death of her and other women like Marie Curie and Lise Meitner, and still somewhat persists today.