Emmy Noether was a brilliant mathematician in an age where women were not considered suitable to be either brilliant or mathematicians. She was also Jewish at a time of Nazism. Both her gender and her religion made it difficult for her to study and gain employment, despite many of her male colleagues supporting her and making efforts on her behalf. Today she is still largely unknown, even by many in the scientific and mathematical world, but her work changed the way those disciplines are studied and thought about.
Albert Einstein called her the most “significant” and “creative” female mathematician of all time, and others of her contemporaries were inclined to drop the modification by sex. She invented a theorem that united with magisterial concision two conceptual pillars of physics: symmetry in nature and the universal laws of conservation. Some consider Noether’s theorem, as it is now called, as important as Einstein’s theory of relativity; it undergirds much of today’s vanguard research in physics, including the hunt for the almighty Higgs boson. Yet Noether herself remains utterly unknown, not only to the general public, but to many members of the scientific community as well…Ransom Stephens, a physicist and novelist who has lectured widely on Noether, said, “You can make a strong case that her theorem is the backbone on which all of modern physics is built.”
She was forced to flee Germany in 1933 and her contemporary Albert Einstein helped her find a post at Bryn Mawr University. Tragically, 18 months later, she died young at age 53 within a few days of having an operation on an ovarian cyst. Had she lived longer it is possible we might have known more about her, but you would think that her work would have spoken for her long before now.