Another Woman Worth Remembering...Emmy Noether
Dear friends of women in science,
A few years ago, I was invited to an event celebrating German biology and chemistry over in Hollywood, and I was impressed by the cutting-edge research I heard about. The governmental funding agencies had assembled an all-star cast of traveling professors from all over the country. They were inviting applications from both students and collaborators. One of the grant programs about which I heard was called the Emmy Noether Award. The name was vaguely familiar, but I didn't take time to look her up. I was very pleased to see, though, that women in science were getting special recognition.
Then a couple of weeks ago, Sonia Pressman Fuentes sent me a link to a small bio of Noether. I was immediatly sorry it had taken me so long to find out more about her. Einstein described her as "the most significant mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began." She was a German Jew who had completed her dissertation in 1907. Back then, it was very hard for women to break into academic positions, and she worked for seven years as an unpaid volunteer before University of Gottengen finally offered her a position. She remained there until the Nazis dismissed all Jews from university jobs. Algebra was her principal focus of research.
In 1933, she moved to the US and taught at Bryn Mawr, and in 1934 she began to lecture at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, which she characterized as a "men's university, where nothing female is admitted." If you've read my memoir, Breaking Through the Spiral Ceiling, you'll remember that I received a letter from Princeton thirty years later telling me that unless I had a peculiar need for their facilities, they wouldn't even send me a graduate catalog.
Noether's Theorem, cited in the article I read as "a conservation law is associated with any differentiable symmetry of a physical system," is considered a major achievement. Some of her colleagues compared its importance with that of the Pythagorean Theorem.
She died in 1935 of ovarian cysts. I was very taken with comments quoted from PS Alexandroff at her memorial service, ""She taught us to think in simple, and thus general, terms . . . and not in complicated algebraic calculations. In this way, she cleared a path toward the discovery of new algebraic patterns that had previously been obscured.""
Definitely worth knowing!
Best,
Laura
I think that Noether is pretty well known in the US mathematics world. The Association for Women in Mathematics has been sponsoring Noether lectures at the annual Joint Mathematics Meetings since 1980. She is part of the women in mathematics poster that was produced by the Mathematical Association of America several years ago: http://www.maa.org/pubs/posterW.pdf
It's not surprising to me that Noether does not seem well known to people in other fields because I don't expect them to have heard of many mathematicians.
A Trabute to Emmy Noether
Good one! I like to hear about the bio and chem people you usually feature, but it's even more inspiring when they are closer to my own field. Noether is a great role model, and I appreciate having a reminder of her.
From: Roswitha T | April 29, 2012
Hi Laura,
In these days when we're being urged to send our bio majors to take more math, it's wonderful to have a role model to mention. Thank you! Have a good end-of-semester.
cheers,
SSW
Dear Laura,
Good one! I like to hear about the bio and chem people you usually feature, but it's even more inspiring when they are closer to my own field. Noether is a great role model, and I appreciate having a reminder of her.
Dear Laura,
I think the Emmy Noether awards are for women who are starting towards being a professor, start up academic awards, although maybe they have some postdoc training with them too. Some of my friends have these, people I knew in the doctoral training and who stayed in Germany. Very good financial support, I've heard.
Okay, Laura, now you're talking my language. I did find her inspiring when I was starting in the field. She did a lot of important algebra, not just that one theorem, although it's a rare mathematician who gets a theorem named after him or her (usually him, of course).
cheers,
ExCS
