Emmy Noether

Overview

Noether worked at Erlangen without a position and then at Göttingen, where for several years she lectured under Hilbert's name because the university would not appoint a woman. Her 1918 result, now called Noether's theorem, shows that every continuous symmetry of a physical system corresponds to a conserved quantity, so that conservation of energy follows from the fact that the laws do not change over time. Her 1921 paper on ideal theory in rings introduced the chain condition that made abstract ring theory possible and gave Noetherian rings their name. She also pressed topologists to treat homology as a matter of groups rather than of numbers, which reshaped the field. Dismissed in 1933 under the racial laws, she moved to Bryn Mawr and died two years later after surgery. Start with a survey article; her own papers assume a great deal.

Where to start reading

• Invariante Variationsprobleme 1918

  The paper containing the theorem linking continuous symmetries of a system to its conserved quantities.

• Idealtheorie in Ringbereichen 1921

  Establishes the ascending chain condition for ideals and with it the framework of modern commutative algebra.

Part of

• Algebra
• Topology

Sources

1. Emmy Noether MacTutor History of Mathematics
2. Emmy Noether Wikipedia
3. Emmy Noether Encyclopaedia Britannica