Amelie Noether
Amalie Emmy Noether was born on 23 March 1882 in Erlangen, Germany . She was a mathematician known for her 
groundbreaking contributions to abstract algebra and theoretical physics, and was described by Albert Einstein and others as the most important woman in the history of mathematics.
Education
Emmy Noether’s father, Max Noether, was a professor of mathematics at the University of Erlangen, possibly inspiring her in her future academic path. She initially wanted to teach languages but after passing the teacher’s examinations in French and English in 1900, she decided instead to study mathematics at the University of Erlangen. Unconventional for the time due to the ban on female students, she had to ask permission from professors to sit in on their lectures. She passed her exams in 1903. During the 1903–04 winter semester she studied at the University of Göttingen, attending lectures given by astronomer Karl Schwarzschild and mathematicians Hermann Minkowski, Otto Blumenthal, Felix Klein, and David Hilbert.
She was able to become an official student at the University of Erlangen in 1904, when she started her doctorate. Under the supervision of Paul Gordan she wrote her dissertation, Über die Bildung des Formensystems der ternären biquadratischen Form (On Complete Systems of Invariants for Ternary Biquadratic Forms). She successfully defended her dissertation in 1907.
Career 1908-1920
Noether worked at the Mathematical Institute of Erlangen, without pay or title, from 1908 to 1915. It was during this time that she collaborated with the algebraist Ernst Otto Fischer and started work on theoretical algebra.
n the spring of 1915, Noether was invited to return to the University of Göttingen by David Hilbert and Felix Klein. She was forced to lecture under Hilbert’s name however due to oppositions to women becoming ‘privatdozent’. In 1919, with the help of Hilbert’s and Albert Einstein’s intervention, she received her habilitation and the status of privatdozent. She did not receive a salary or official title until 1922, when she became an “associate professor without tenure” and began to receive a small salary.
Work on Algebra
During the 1920s Noether did foundational work on abstract algebra, working in group theory, ring theory, group representations, and number theory. In collaboration with W. Schmeidler, she then published a paper about the theory of ideals in which they defined left and right ideals in a ring. The following year she published a landmark paper called, Idealtheorie in Ringbereichen, analyzing ascending chain conditions with regard to ideals.
In 1928-29 she was a visiting professor at the University of Moscow. In 1930, she taught at Frankfurt. The International Mathematical Congress in Zurich asked her to give a plenary lecture in 1932, and in the same year she was awarded the prestigious Ackermann-Teubner Memorial Prize in mathematics.
Rise of Nazism and flight to America
In April 1933, Noether received a letter forbidding her to teach under the new ‘Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service’, enacted by the recently-elected Nazi party. This Law removed Jews and politically-suspect government employees from civil service, including university posts. She accepted a position at Bryn Mawr College in America, financially supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, and left Germany at the end of 1933.
She died of post-surgical complications to remove an ovarian cyst in 1935.
See Also
- Women in Science
- Female Nobel Prize Laureates
References
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether
- http://www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/noether.html
- http://www.emmynoether.com/