Today's Google Doodle honors what would have been the 133rd birthday of a woman Einstein once called a "creative mathematical genius," Emmy Noether.
The German-born Noether, who made contributions to fields as varied as algebra and theoretical physics, was also hailed by her other contemporaries, including Pavel Alexandrov and Jean Dieudonné.
Noether's father was one of Germany's leading mathematicians, inspiring his children to follow in his footsteps. When the young Emmy Noether attended university in Erlangen, Germany, she was only one of two women at the school. However, because she was a woman, she could not technically enroll for classes and had to audit them instead.
Noether later went on to become a university lecturer, but did not receive payment because she was a woman. In fact, Noether worked for free until 1922.
Not only did Noether face discrimination because she was a woman, she also faced discrimination because she was Jewish. In 1933, she was forced to flee Germany after the Nazis took control of the country and banned Jews from holding teaching positions in education. She moved to the U.S., where her contributions to mathematics became widely known.
Noether revolutionized abstract algebra by providing a theorem, later called Noether's theorem, that theoretical physicists Leon M. Lederman and Christopher T. Hill called "one of the most important mathematical theorems ever proved in guiding the development of modern physics" in their book.
Noether also contributed to the works of other mathematicians in fields as varied as algebraic topology to theoretical physics.
When Noether died in 1935, Einstein wrote the following in her obituary in The New York Times:
"In the judgment of the most competent living mathematicians. Fräulein Noether was the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began. In the realm of algebra, in which the most gifted mathematicians have been busy for centuries. She discovered methods which have proved of enormous importance in the development of the present-day younger generation of mathematicians."
Today, Google celebrates Noether with an illustration representative of her work.
In this doodle, each circle symbolizes a branch of math or physics that Noether devoted her illustrious career to," writes Doodle artist Sophie Diao. "From left to right, you can see topology (the donut and coffee mug), ascending/descending chains, Noetherian rings (represented in the doodle by the Lasker-Noether theorem), time, group theory, conservation of angular momentum, and continuous symmetries-and the list keeps going on and on from there!"
[Photo Credit: Google]
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