It is a sad fact that there are few women in mathematics, so few that sometimes you wonder if the ones you hear of are considered to be great only as a condescension to their gender. But not Amalie Emmy Noether. Once when Edward Landau was asked if he would agree to the statement that she was a great woman mathematician, he reversed the question: ``I can testify that she is a great mathematician, but that she is a woman, I cannot swear.'' (this seemingly chauvinistic statement should be seen in the context of the times)
![[Emmy as a young lady]](emmy2.gif)
She was born in 1882, the eldest of eleven children. Her dad, Max Noether, was a mathematics
professor at the University of Erlangen. She had a normal childhood ---
complete with school, housework and dancing --- and qualified at 18 to be a
English and French teacher. But she wanted to go to university, no easy task
in the Germany of 1900! Eventually she became half of the entire female
population of the thousand students at Erlangen, earning a doctorate in
1907.
Till 1916, she worked (without pay since only men could be employed) as a researcher at the Mathematical Institute in Erlangen, giving seminars and sometimes substituting for her aging father in lectures. Then she moved to Gottingen, where the great mathematicians David Hilbert and Felix Klein tried desperately to get her a formal position. But the road was blocked by narrow-minded members of the Prussian establishment, prompting Hilbert to angrily say:
``I do not see that the sex of the candidate is an argument against her admission as Privatdozent (lecturer). After all, we are a university, not a bathing establishment.''
Eventually she was allowed to lecture under Hilbert's name. The status of women improved after World War One and she was given in 1922 the official title of (!) ``Unofficial Associate Professor''. Tough times, indeed. She began receiving a small salary for the first time in her life soon afterwards.
Gottingen in the 1920s was the place to be for a mathematician, and students from all over the world came to it. Emmy and the group around her had a marked effect on the world of algebra. Her insatiable desire was to generalize, to make concepts more abstract and powerful, and by 1932 she was happy to receive several international plaudits for her work.
Her relationship with her students was legendary. To quote Norbert Wiener, she was ``an energetic and very nearsighted washerwoman whose many students flocked around her like a clutch of ducklings around a kind, motherly hen.'' The most prominent of these students were called the ``Noether boys'' and were from Germany, Russia, Holland, Israel, China and Japan! These constituted her family, and she would take insults to them far more seriously than insults to herself.
She did not give two hoots to her clothing and thus ended up ![[the older Emmy]](emmy.gif)
looking pretty shabby! But it was a contagious shabbiness, for some of her students began doing pretty unthinkable things --- like wearing shirtsleeves. Interesting times! Anyway, the style was promptly dubbed the ``Noether-guard uniform''. Her behaviour was little better, as made amusingly clear by Olga Taussky, a Czechoslovakian student who was very close to her:
``When lunch came I sat down next to Emmy, to her left. She was very busy discussing mathematics with the man on her right and several people across the table. She was having a very good time. She are her lunch, but gesticulated violently when eating. This kept her left hand busy too, for she spilled her food constantly and wiped it off from her dress, completely unperturbed.''
She was a poor teacher and avoided lecturing undergraduate classes. She would think very fast and talk even faster, resulting in her audience having to keep on their mental toes at all times. Many basic concepts of today's algebra grew from these talks, since there were others (like her brilliant Dutch boy Bartel Van der Waerden) who would translate her ideas into classic texts that normal mathematical humans could understand.
But the Nazis came to power in 1932. Before long, all the Jewish lecturers at Gottingen, including Emmy, were thrown out. Many great intellects perished in the flames of the holocaust, but the famous ones were able to leave Germany. Emmy left for the States, in particular Bryn Mawr College, causing much excitement in the American mathematical fraternity. Her English was quite usable, and she had a lot of fun figuring out the American way of life. But she was also getting increasingly worried, about her health, the situation in Germany, etc and sometimes struck her closest friends with bouts of temper (which she would profusely apologize for afterwards).
Then in April 1935, she died suddenly a few days after an operation. Obituaries soon followed in several languages, of this simple, motherly, naive, vanity-free, woman. We end with an extract from Albert Einstein's letter to the New York Times about Emmy.
``Beneath the effort directed towards the accumulation of worldly goods lies all too frequently the illusion that this is the most substantial and desirable end to be achieved; but there is, fortunately, a minority composed of those who recognize early in their lives that the most beautiful and satisfying experiences open to humankind are not derived from the outside, but are bound up with the development of the individual's own feeling. thinking and acting. The genuine artists, investigators and thinkers have always been persons of this kind. However inconspicuously the life of these individuals runs its course, none the less the fruits of their endeavours are the most valuable contributions which one generation can make to its successors.''
