Great disoveries in mathematics and sciences ought to be celebrated, but a challenge for most of us non-specialists is understanding what exactly it is that we are supposed to be admiring. Amalie “Emmy” Noether (d. 1935) was, according to many great minds (such as Albert Einstein), the most important female mathematician in history. Her accomplishments are numerous – biographers break down her creative periods into three separate phases, suggestive of the range of topics she developed – but the ways she linked mathematical abstract concepts to the way the physical world works are among the most important. I am going to try to get the gist of one of her significant ideas across, because all too often we skip over the very achievements that put great thinkers on the map of history for want of understanding them. So here, I am not aiming for subtlety, but for meaning. In “Noether’s Theorem” Noether mathematically explained how an object’s contact with other objects preserves a symmetry with angular momentum regardless of the medium it travels through or its direction. Noether successfully developed an academic career in Germany at a period when women were excluded, earning a doctorate, lecturing at a university, publishing in her field, and nurturing many graduate students who later went on to successful careers. Eventually it was not patriarchy but xenophobia that ousted her from her German university. As the Nazis came to power, they eliminated Jews from such positions, and Emmy Noether joined Albert Einstein and others as fellow Germans who fled to the United States. Noether finished her career at Bryn Mawyr University, dying at 53 years from complications from a surgery.
