Emmy Noether

Amalie Emmy Noether was a German mathematician whose work on abstract algebra and theoretical physics ranks among the most consequential of the twentieth century. Born on March 23, 1882, in Erlangen, Bavaria, she was the daughter of mathematician Max Noether and grew up in an academic Jewish household where higher learning was simply assumed.

German universities barred women from full enrollment, so Noether audited courses at Erlangen before regulations softened, allowing her to take her doctorate in 1907 with a dissertation on algebraic invariants. For seven years she worked unpaid at the Mathematical Institute in Erlangen. In 1915 David Hilbert and Felix Klein invited her to Göttingen to apply her invariant theory to Albert Einstein's emerging general relativity.

The result, published in 1918, was Noether's theorem, a deep linkage between symmetries and conservation laws that became a cornerstone of modern theoretical physics, explaining why energy, momentum, and electric charge are conserved. Hilbert had to circumvent the faculty's refusal to habilitate a woman by listing her lectures under his own name. She finally received habilitation in 1919 but was not paid a regular salary until 1923.

Through the 1920s she revolutionized abstract algebra, reshaping ring theory, ideal theory, and the study of noncommutative algebras. Her seminar at Göttingen drew students from around the world, the so-called Noether boys. The Nazi regime dismissed her in 1933 because she was Jewish; she emigrated to Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. She died on April 14, 1935, after surgery for an ovarian cyst.

The name Amalie is of Germanic origin, from amal meaning work or labor, and Emmy is its diminutive. She used the feminine form throughout her life.