Emmy Noether - Tales of Awesomeness

This is a story of a tremendous mathematical genius from the early 20^th century. This person helped illuminate profound fundamental truths of the universe using mathematics that the layperson could barely fathom, and in so doing set the bedrock on which some of the most important breakthroughs in physics in the 20th century took place.

And I’ll bet you’ve never heard of her.

Oh, you were expecting me to talk about Albert Einstein? Sure, in the story of science, you’d be hard pressed to find someone more famous than Albert Einstein. He’s become a literal dictionary definition of what we mere mortals think of as a genius. But there is someone that he called a genius – and yet very few in the general public has ever heard of her.

Her name is Emmy Noether, and this is her story.

In a nutshell, she was described by Pavel Alexandrov, Albert Einstein, Jean Dieudonné, Hermann Weyl, and Norbert Wiener as the most important woman in the history of mathematics. These were all prominent mathematicians and physicists from the turn of the 20^th century, luminaries in the mental explorations of the universe. And they all should’ve simply said that she was one of the most important figures in mathematics, period.

As one of the leading mathematicians of her time, she developed the theories of rings, fields, and algebras and applied her intellect to physics where her theorem, known now simply to the theoretical physics community the world over as “Noether’s theorem”, explains the connection between symmetry and conservation laws.

In case this doesn’t impress you, it’s the theorem that underpins practically all of modern physics. Indeed, this connection between symmetry and conservation laws is what is used to investigate everything from subatomic particle physics where new particles and forces of nature are discovered using such tools as the Large Hadron Collider, to the exploration of black holes and the fundamental, cosmic nature of reality.

As grand as her ideas have become now, she herself did not experience much of the fame and acclaim her ideas will find later in the century.

Noether was born in Erlangen, Germany in 1882. Her father, Max, was a lecturer and researcher in mathematics at the University of Erlangen and she wished to study mathematics like her father. However, back in those days, German universities did not admit women, so she was forced to audit the classes instead. However, she did so well on the final exams that the university awarded her an undergraduate degree in mathematics anyway.

She went on to study for her doctoral dissertation in 1904 and got her doctorate in 1907. However, because women were excluded from academic positions at the time, she worked at the Mathematical Institute of Erlangen for seven years without pay. She was allowed to study her beloved mathematics, she just couldn’t be on the books to be paid for it.

In 1915, she was invited by David Hilbert and Felix Klein of the University of Gottingen to come review a paper by Albert Einstein because some of the math he had written didn’t quite add up, so to speak. At the time, the University of Gottingen was like the Harvard/MIT/Stanford/Cambridge/Caltech of the mathematics world, and being called by David Hilbert to solve a math problem was like being called by Thomas Jefferson to wordsmith a certain Declaration. OK, terrible analogy, but you get the idea.

This essential unknown attacked this problem with vigor and creativity and came up with a resolution to Einstein’s paper. What was this paper you ask? Oh, it was a little-known paper that he wrote that simply completely rewrote the meaning of space and time and redefined gravity. And in so doing, her work on this problem also led to her ideas that we now call the Noether theorem.

Unfortunately for Noether, she did not receive the acclaim or the recognition that she deserved. Although praised by her academic and intellectual peers – Einstein was said to have said that she was a peerless creative genius – she received no such love from academic officialdom. She stayed on at Gottingen as an unpaid lecturer – essentially a volunteer – despite the championing of Hilbert on her behalf. She finally got a small salary in 1922 as an untenured professor, but even this was not to last.

You see, in 1933, the Nazis forbade anyone of Jewish heritage from teaching at a German university, and Emmy Noether was Jewish. She fled Germany soon thereafter and settled in the US, finding a position at Bryn Mawr College. Her time there was pleasant but sadly short. About 18 months after her move to the US, she passed away due to complications stemming from a surgery to remove an ovarian cyst.

Emmy Noether’s life was short but profoundly impactful. She was a genius of the 1st order and although unappreciated by the wider world at the time, she was recognized by her peers and like minds in her own lifetime. Yet she remains unrecognized still. Without her ideas that tied in symmetry and the laws of conservation in physics, as well as her numerous other contributions to advanced algebraic theory, much of what physics knows about the universe could’ve played out very differently.

She made a serious dent in the universe, a universe she helped to illuminate. It’s time that the rest of the world knows more about her.