History of Feminism
Related: About this forumEmmy Noether, the Most Significant Mathematician You've Never Heard Of
Scientists are a famously anonymous lot, but few can match in the depths of her perverse and unmerited obscurity the 20th-century mathematical genius Amalie Noether.
Albert Einstein called her the most significant and creative female mathematician of all time, and others of her contemporaries were inclined to drop the modification by sex. She invented a theorem that united with magisterial concision two conceptual pillars of physics: symmetry in nature and the universal laws of conservation. Some consider Noethers theorem, as it is now called, as important as Einsteins theory of relativity; it undergirds much of todays vanguard research in physics, including the hunt for the almighty Higgs boson. Yet Noether herself remains utterly unknown, not only to the general public, but to many members of the scientific community as well.
When Dave Goldberg, a physicist at Drexel University who has written about her work, recently took a little Noether poll of several dozen colleagues, students and online followers, he was taken aback by the results. Surprisingly few could say exactly who she was or why she was important, he said. A few others knew her name but couldnt recall what shed done, and the majority had never heard of her.
Noether (pronounced NER-ter) was born in Erlangen, Germany, 130 years ago this month. So its a fine time to counter the chronic neglect and celebrate the life and work of a brilliant theorist whose unshakable number love and irrationally robust sense of humor helped her overcome severe handicaps first, being female in Germany at a time when most German universities didnt accept female students or hire female professors, and then being a Jewish pacifist in the midst of the Nazis rise to power.
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Cirque du So-What
(25,939 posts)but I went to a private liberal-arts school that required a term paper for every class taken, and I chose Emmy Noether for one of the numerous math classes I took. She made significant contributions in the area of topology as well.
villager
(26,001 posts)eppur_se_muova
(36,263 posts)I seem to recall that's where I first heard of it.
If so, I wouldn't think she's so "unknown" among math and science geeks.
Manifestor_of_Light
(21,046 posts)She's in there with Hypatia, Caroline Herschel, Sonia Corvin-Krukovsky Kovalesky, and others.
redqueen
(115,103 posts)So the audience is the average newspaper reader moreso than math geeks, much less academics.
mathematic
(1,439 posts)Forget that physics stuff. That's just there because connecting somebody to physics is how significance is communicated to the general public.
Noether's most important contribution (and probably why she isn't well known outside of mathematicians) is how she revolutionized the study of algebra. It's hard to understate her contributions. Algebra through the 1800s was very ad hoc. Noether used simple definitions and proof techniques to generalize (and simplify) the study of algebra. Today, these generalizations are as commonly used by mathematicians as text messaging is used by teenagers.
Perhaps another way to communicate her contributions is how algebra is taught today compared to how it was taught in Gauss' day (early 1800s). (Note: this isn't the algebra of high school). If you studied euclidian geometry in high school it's, more or less, the same thing that's been taught for millennia. Subjects like calculus and (college) algebra are very different from how the pioneers in these fields originally came up with the ideas. Noether is responsible for the change in algebra and Cauchy is responsible for the change in calculus (and mathematics in general). This type of mathematics, though not glamorous, is vital to the advancement of the field.
As for her general notoriety... be honest how many famous mathematicians can you (the general public) name at all?
Noether's theorem is the very foundation of modern theoretical particle physics - mentioning it is no mere sop to communication with the general public. Every physicist knows who she is, though we're less familiar with the work mathematicians get excited about.
Warren DeMontague
(80,708 posts)So it's nice to see women excelling in what has been a historically male-dominated field. Our country needs to improve math and science education to keep up.. thanks for this!
usrname
(398 posts)came to the US and taught at Bryn Mawr (I believe). One anecdote that was told about Emmy Noether was about her talking about "killing the conductor" about some topic in mathematics. (The conductor was some mathematical entity and killing it was to find where it turned zero, or something like that.) In german, "conductor" is "fuehrer" and Noether was in a subway with some other mathematicians and she goes on vehemently discussing killing the fuehrer. All the other mathematicians turned paled in fright. (This was in the 1930s.) Noether was completely clueless about what she was saying, but all the other mathematicians were completely frightened to death.