Emmy Noether (1882–1935)

Amalie Emmy Noether was born to a Jewish family in Erlangen, Germany. Her father Max Noether was a well-known mathematics professor and two of her three brothers became scientists. She used her middle name from a young age. She graduated from the Höhere Töchter Schule, a kind of finishing school for young ladies, where she learned English and French. In 1900, she passed the examination for certification as a language teacher, but instead chose to study mathematics, a field that did not welcome women at the time. She first audited classes at the University of Göttingen, then returned to Erlangen in 1904 when women finally were permitted to enroll as full students. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Erlangen in 1907. For the next seven years, she worked without pay on her own research and assisted her father at the Mathematics Institute. In 1915, she was invited to Göttingen by David Hilbert and Felix Klein and worked with them to explore the mathematics behind Albert Einstein’s recently-published theory of general relativity. She proved two theorems that were basic for both general relativity and elementary particle physics, one of which is still known as "Noether's Theorem." In 1919, she won admission to Göttingen as an academic lecturer, over the objections of many men, and later became an associate professor, although she received only a menial salary. Her first major article, "Concerning Moduli in Noncommutative Fields, Particularly in Differential and Difference Terms," written with Werner Schmeidler and published in Mathematische Zeitschrift in 1920, brought her to notice as an extraordinary mathematician. During the next decade, Emmy Noether did foundational work that led to a body of principles unifying algebra, geometry, linear algebra, topology, and logic. She was awarded the prestigious Ackermann-Teubner Memorial Prize in Mathematics in 1932. After the Nazi regime came to power in Germany in 1933, she lost her job, as did other Jewish professors. Later that year, she moved to the USA to become a visiting professor of mathematics at Bryn Mawr College and to lecture and conduct research at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. In 1935, at age 53, she had surgery to remove an ovarian cyst and died from a post-operative infection.