MOTW - Emmy Noether

Mathematician of the Day is Emmy Noether (1882-1935)

Emmy Noether was born in Germany and is arguably the most influential women mathematician in history.

After initially being reluctant to study mathematics at a young age, she eventually joined her father and brother, who were both mathematicians as well, and enrolled in a doctoral program at the University of Erlangen in Germany.

Noether is best known for discovering Noether’s Theorem, which links mathematics and physics in an extremely important way. The theorem, which is named after her, relates the laws of nature and conservation to mathematical symmetry and how we understand the universe.

Noether’s Theorem: States that every differentiable symmetry of the action of a physical system has a corresponding conservation law. (via wikipedia.org)

At the time, her theory was truly groundbreaking and influenced in how mathematicians and scientists thought about and understood the workings of our universe.

In addition to Noether’s Theorem, she made major contributions to the fields of theoretical physics and abstract algebra.

In fact, Albert Einstein dubbed her as “the most significant mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began.”