The Story of
Emmy Noether
"The most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced", as Einstein described her, Emmy Noether was a German Mathematician who made many key contributions to abstract Algebra, the most crucial being 'Noether's Theorem.' Mother to some of the most distinctive innovations of 20th century mathematics, she stands as one of the finest examples of 'helpless genius' worn down by societal bias.
Noether's Theorem
High school teaches us enough about the laws of conservation. Conservation of energy, for one, states that the total energy of interacting bodies in a closed system remains constant. Energy cannot be created or destroyed.
Symmetry is the quality of an object to be rotated around an axis, in any direction, and still appear the same. For example, the two wings of a butterfly are nearly mirror images of each other, a property known as reflection symmetry.
Noether’s Theorem deals with continuous symmetries which hold no matter how far you move them in space or time. Noether’s theorem was a proof that these continuous symmetries are what gives rise to the various conservations.
Energy conservation, according to Noether, comes from translation symmetry in time, or the symmetry of an object whose laws of physics remain constant regardless of how you move about the cosmos.
"...A Guiding Star to 20th & 21st century Physics"
These are the words MIT's Franza Wilczek and several other leaders in physics use to describe the impact of Noether's Theorem. The Theorem was deduced by Emmy Noether, a German genius & a force in the circles of 20th Century Mathematics.
She kickstarted a brand new discipline of mathematics, abstract algebra, in a time when mathematics as a career was but an uphill battle for women, and went on to become the first woman to speak at the International Mathematics Congress.
Hermann Weyl-one of the greatest mathematicians of the first half of the twentieth century-said, "I was ashamed to occupy such a preferred position beside her whom I knew to be my superior as a mathematician in many respects.”
In spite of being the most gifted of mathematicians, gender bias kept Emmy from landing a paying job. She worked unpaid at the Mathematical Institute of Erlangen for seven long years. Later in her career, she worked in the shadows of her male colleagues at the University of Gottingen.
Several Professors at the University of Gottingen protested a woman's presence in the teaching ranks of the institute, and apart from her genius capacities, her resilience in the face of opposition is what makes Noether's story relevant even today.
Years after Noether, women still fight an uphill battle to secure a place of authority in STEM, in universities, congresses, and conferences. Today, only one woman, Maryam Mirzakhani, has received the prestigious Fields Medal, and none has won the Abel Prize.
Over a 100 years later, the world is still unaware of the brilliance it forgoes each time another Emmy Noether is unfairly denied the chance to manifest her skill and talent.