Emmy Noether
Physicist · 1882-1935 · Physics, stage 3: Meet the physicists
Proved that every continuous symmetry of a physical system yields a conserved quantity.
Overview
Emmy Noether was a mathematician at Göttingen who was refused a salaried position for years because of her sex and lectured under a colleague's name. Hilbert and Klein brought her in to work on a difficulty in general relativity concerning the conservation of energy, and the theorem she published in 1918 settled it while producing a result far more general than the problem required: to every continuous symmetry of a system's dynamics there corresponds a conserved quantity, and the reverse also holds. Time invariance gives conservation of energy, spatial invariance gives conservation of momentum, rotational invariance gives angular momentum. She spent most of her later career on abstract algebra, where her influence is equally large. She was dismissed by the Nazi government in 1933 and moved to Bryn Mawr College, dying two years later. Read a modern exposition of the theorem before the 1918 paper, which is written for mathematicians.
Where to start reading
Invariant Variational Problems 1918
The paper containing the two theorems linking continuous symmetries to conservation laws, written to resolve a question about energy conservation in general relativity.
Part of
Sources
- Emmy Noether English Wikipedia
- Emmy Noether Britannica
- Noether's theorem English Wikipedia
