the Perimeter

The Poetry of Logical Ideas
Emmy Noether’s astounding insights
continue to underpin physics.
Pity most people haven’t heard of her.
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To understand and visualize the new and elegant theory
of general relativity, the physicists of the day needed a
mathematical poet.
Her name was Emmy Noether.
Noether was a German mathematician who played with symmetry.
Just as a poem has symmetrical qualities that make it lyrical to the ear,
nature has internal symmetries: attributes that remain unchanged
when a system goes through some other transformation.
In two landmark theorems, published in 1918, Noether described
how conservation laws and continuous symmetry properties are
intrinsically linked.
In a tribute to Noether published in the New York Times shortly after
her death, Albert Einstein wrote “pure mathematics is, in its way, the
poetry of logical ideas,” and he described Noether as a master of
the craft.
She was “the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far
produced since the higher education of women began,” he wrote.
Einstein’s theory of general relativity, describing gravity emerging
from the warping of spacetime, generated excitement when it was
hot off the press in 1915.
Yet few are aware of his compatriot, who did groundbreaking
mathematical work at around the same time, and whose influence
resonates through every branch of modern physics today.
*
Amalie Emmy Noether was born in 1882 to a Jewish family
in Erlangen, Germany, where her father, Max Noether, was a
mathematics professor. She excelled at math-related puzzles
even as a child, but she had to buck social convention to pursue
mathematics at a time when a woman was expected to get married,
have children, and perhaps, if she were to pursue a career, become
a teacher in a girls’ school.