Emmy Noether

Emmy Noether was born on 23 March 1882 in Erlangen, Bavaria, and died on 14 April 1935 in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, in the United States. She earned her doctorate at Erlangen in 1907, then worked there for years without pay before David Hilbert and Felix Klein invited her to Gottingen in 1915. While there during the First World War she addressed problems in theoretical physics and relativity, proving what became known as Noether's theorem, that to every infinitesimal transformation of the Lorentz group there corresponds a conservation theorem, a result linking symmetries of a physical system directly to its conserved quantities and later described by Albert Einstein as an instance of penetrating mathematical thinking. Her 1921 paper Idealtheorie in Ringbereichen refounded ring theory by showing how ideals in commutative rings decompose, work that became foundational to modern abstract algebra. The Nazi regime dismissed her from Gottingen in April 1933 solely because of her Jewish heritage; she emigrated to the United States that October to a visiting professorship at Bryn Mawr College, lecturing simultaneously at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study until her sudden death from complications of surgery in 1935.