Emmy Noether

Amalie Emmy Noether was a German mathematician described by Albert Einstein, David Hilbert, and Hermann Weyl as the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began. Barred from formal university admission in Bavaria because of her gender, Noether audited classes before eventually earning her doctorate at Erlangen under Paul Gordan, working for years without salary.

Invited to Göttingen by Hilbert and Felix Klein in 1915 to help resolve an energy conservation paradox in Einstein's general relativity, Noether proved Noether's theorem (1918)—one of the most profound and elegant theorems in modern physics. She proved that every continuous symmetry of a physical system corresponds to a fundamental conservation law (e.g., time symmetry implies conservation of energy; spatial translation implies conservation of momentum). In the 1920s, Noether revolutionized abstract algebra, creating the modern theories of rings, fields, ideals, and ascending chain conditions (Noetherian rings). Dismissed by the Nazi regime in 1933 because she was Jewish, she emigrated to Bryn Mawr College in the United States.