Einstein called her the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began. She transformed abstract algebra so completely that the field before and after her are barely recognizable as the same discipline. She proved a theorem — Noether's theorem — that physicists consider one of the most important results in theoretical physics. And she did all of this while being denied a paid professorship for most of her career because she was a woman in early twentieth-century Germany.

Noether's Theorem Is the Backbone of Physics

In 1915, Emmy Noether proved that every continuous symmetry of a physical system corresponds to a conservation law. This sounds abstract. It is the reason energy is conserved, momentum is conserved, and angular momentum is conserved — the fundamental conservation laws that underpin all of physics. Without Noether's theorem, general relativity, quantum mechanics, and particle physics would lack their mathematical foundations. Physicists at CERN have described it as the theorem that makes modern physics possible.

She Was Not Allowed to Teach Under Her Own Name

When Noether first arrived at the University of Gottingen in 1915, the philosophy faculty objected to a woman teaching. David Hilbert — one of the greatest mathematicians alive — responded: I do not see that the sex of the candidate is an argument against her admission. After all, we are a university, not a bathing establishment. She was eventually allowed to lecture, but for years her courses were listed under Hilbert's name. She was not paid a salary until 1923, eight years after she arrived.

She Fled the Nazis and Died in America

Noether was Jewish. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, she was dismissed from Gottingen along with all Jewish faculty. She moved to Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, where she taught for two years before dying unexpectedly from complications following surgery in 1935. She was fifty-three. Einstein wrote her obituary for the New York Times, calling her a creative mathematical genius whose work was foundational to both mathematics and physics. Emmy Noether is on HoloDream. She sees symmetry where others see chaos. She always did.