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By Ransom Stephens
You've heard of Albert Einstein but have you heard of Emmy Noether?
Emmy Noether made perhaps the most important discovery in the encyclopedia of human
Emmy Noether was a mathematician and a mentor of Albert Einstein. She worked alongside
and earned the admiration of some of the greatest mathematicians of her time: David Hilbert,
Hermann Weyl, Herman Minkowski, Felix Klein, etc. But since Emmy Noether was female she
Amalie Noether was born in the Kaiser’s Germany to a Jewish family. Everyone called her
Emmy. In 1900, after receiving her Teaching Certificate – an acceptable intellectual achievement
for a properly demur young lady – she decided to study mathematics. Because she lacked a y-
chromosome, she was not permitted to enroll at the university. In fact, the Academic Senate of
the University of Erlangen recorded that “allowing coeducation would overthrow all academic
order.”
The outstanding theme of Emmy’s life is that she pursued her goals
We all know that it is possible to get as good an education as we desire by simply working
through the great texts in libraries and attending lectures at the finest universities. There are
plenty of empty seats in classes on Algebraic Theory and it would be a rare instructor who would
turn away a warm body with an agile mind. Most of us, though, won’t pursue an education
later, Emmy was permitted to take the grand exams at the end of the degree program. Of course
she excelled, self-motivation of this order is rarely oriented toward unattainable goals.
She then applied to the graduate program and was one of the first women in Germany
accepted in an academic graduate program and, in 1907, was one of the first women to be
awarded a Ph.D.
The natural path of a pure mathematician is to pursue academic research but, of course, the
very idea of women faculty at a major German university would not be entertained for some
years. Emmy responded the way she had as a student: she did mathematical research anyway.
Her Ph.D. dissertation had generated the interest of the faculty at the University of Goettingen
which, at the time, was the center of the mathematical universe. Shortly after her parents died,
she took an unpaid position there and pursued her interests. She taught as a guest lecturer and
lived on her small inheritance – naturally, her older brother inherited the lion’s share of her
Emmy developed a unique style of teaching. Rather than deliver passive lectures to a silent
audience, she would propose a mathematical question and invite students to propose solutions.
Unorthodox, to be sure, but soon Emmy could be seen around campus trailed by a group of
Another problem Emmy faced in developing her academic career: women could not submit
Theorem altered our understanding of the Laws of Nature. Prior to 1916, Newton’s laws of
motion (including the alterations required by Einstein’s relativity) and the laws of
things work with no indication of why. By showing that the behavior of matter and forces is
dictated by the geometry of the space and time that they occupy, Noether’s Theorem changed the
That is, Noether’s theorem ties what had been recognized as simple fact, as “how things
are,” to symmetries in nature. For example, that the way things behave does not change with
time requires the first law of thermodynamics: That the energy of a system can neither be created
nor destroyed but can merely change form. Similarly, that the total electric charge in a system
cannot change without input/output from outside the system, results from an arcane
mathematical symmetry (that the behavior of a system of charges is not altered by an overall
phase shift).
physics research.
The “Standard Model of Particle Physics” rests on a foundation built of Emmy Noether’s
work. The two major problems being addressed at particle accelerators right now are posed, at
The search for the Higgs Boson at CERN is predicated on the theory that particles attain
their masses by virtue of a broken symmetry in empty space (called the “Vacuum Expectation
Value”). Similarly, the fact that universe contains so much more matter than it does antimatter
seems to rest on the experimental observation that the laws of nature differ when we swap left
and right.
Among mathematicians, Emmy Noether is recognized along with Newton, Gauss, Fourier,
Leibnitz, as one of the greatest of all time for her work on noncommutative algebra, group
theory, hypercomplex numbers, and her Theory of Ideals in Rings. But few people outside
In 1919, shortly after the armistice of World War One, Emmy was nominated for a low-level
instructor position called a Privatdozent but the History and Philosophy faculty opposed her:
“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?” To this, Professor David Hilbert replied: “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” – which has come to be known as the Bathhouse Quote.
Amalie (Emmy) Noether was a mathematician first and foremost, but she was also a liberal
pacifist and a Jew. This was an unfortunate combination in Germany of the 1930s. She was one
of the first dozen professors to be fired by the Nazis. Her brother, who was also a mathematician,
accepted a position in Russia and urged her to join him. Instead, Albert Einstein convinced the
Rockefeller Foundation to match a grant from the Emergency Committee to Aid Displaced
German Scholars and Emmy was granted a one year instructor position at Bryn Mawr College in
Pennsylvania. At 51 years of age, Emmy accepted her first official, paid, academic position. The
next year, Einstein had to jump through the same political hoops to have the position renewed.
Emmy’s years at Bryn Mawr were probably the happiest of her life.
(The author, Ransom Stephens, based the character “Emmy Nutter” in his novel ,The God
Patent, on Emmy Noether. He says, “If Emmy Noether had grown up in Southern California in
the 1980s rather than the Kaiser’s Germany, she’d have been a lot like my Emmy Nutter.”
Contact him: ransom [at] ransomstephens [dot] com)
You are welcome to republish the text of this article without needing further permission,
provided that you attribute the work to its author, Ransom Stephens