21/11/2018

Emmy Noether, 'father' of modern algebra

Emmy Noether

Reproduction of Marcelo Viana's column in Folha de S.Paulo.

It was my first International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) and it was amazing.

The ICM 1990, in the beautiful Japanese city of Kyoto, was full of novelties. It was the first in Asia. In a spectacular convention center, where Japanese aesthetics adorn the concrete. And there was a woman giving a plenary lecture, the highest-level one.

American Karen Uhlenbeck began by recounting that, upon receiving the invitation, she commented to a colleague that she would be the first female plenary speaker at the ICM since Emmy Noether in 1932. The young man replied that he didn't know that "he" (Noether!) had been a plenary speaker: he recognized the name of an important mathematician and assumed it was a man.

Amalie Emmy Noether was born in 1882, the daughter of the German Jewish mathematician Max Noether. She studied at the University of Erlangen, where her father taught and where there were only two women among about a thousand students. After completing her doctorate, she taught at the university for seven years without pay.

In 1915, she was invited by the renowned David Hilbert and Felix Klein to join the mathematics department at the famous University of Göttingen. Professors from the history and philosophy departments opposed her hiring. “It would be unacceptable for soldiers to return [from the war] to the university and find a woman teaching.” Hilbert retorted: “I don’t see how the candidate’s sex could be an argument against her admission as a lecturer. We are in a university, not a bathhouse.”

Even so, in her early years in Göttingen, Emmy Noether had neither a salary nor an official position: her classes were assigned to Hilbert, but she was the one who showed up to teach the lessons.

Noether is the author of many important mathematical works, especially in the field of algebra. The famous "Noether's theorem" explains the conservation of physical quantities, such as energy or momentum, through symmetries in the laws of nature. It is a profound idea that had an enormous influence on 20th-century physics, particularly on the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics.

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