Emmy Noether lectured for four years under David Hilbert's name
When Göttingen's philosophy faculty balked at hiring a woman, Emmy Noether spent four years teaching courses advertised as Hilbert's. Her theorem linking symmetry to conservation laws became a pillar of modern physics, and Einstein, Weyl and Wiener each called her the most important woman in the history of mathematics.
Noether was born on 23 March 1882 in Erlangen, the eldest of four children; her father was the mathematician Max Noether, and both parents came from rich Jewish trading families. Christened Amalie, she went by her middle name from childhood. She was nearsighted, had a slight lisp, and cared little for the cooking, cleaning and piano lessons expected of girls, though she loved dancing. In 1900 she scored very good on the exam to teach French and English at girls' schools.
She chose mathematics instead, at the university where her father taught. Two years earlier its senate had warned that mixed classes would overthrow academic order, and she was one of just two women among 986 students, allowed only to audit with each professor's consent. Once Bavaria lifted its restrictions she enrolled properly in 1904 and wrote a 1907 doctorate under Paul Gordan listing more than 300 computed invariants, work she later dismissed as crap. For seven years she taught at Erlangen unpaid, sometimes standing in for her ailing father.
In 1915 Hilbert and Felix Klein brought her to Göttingen, and her habilitation was finally approved in 1919. Her first theorem, from the calculus of variations, is ranked among the most important results ever for guiding physics. Her 1921 paper on ideals in commutative rings, built on the ascending chain condition, turned abstract algebra into a general tool, and such structures are now called Noetherian. Her followers were nicknamed the Noether Boys, and B. L. van der Waerden, who joined in 1924, based the second volume of his 1931 Moderne Algebra on her ideas.
After a plenary address at the 1932 International Congress in Zürich, her standing was recognised worldwide. The following year the Nazi government expelled Jews from universities, and she moved to Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, teaching women such as Olga Taussky-Todd while also lecturing at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study. She died on 14 April 1935.
Source: Emmy Noether
