Emmy Amalie Noether, la donna che stupì Einstein

Strickland, Elisabetta

Matematica, cultura e società, Série 1, Tome 3 (2018) no. 1, pp. 61-69

Résumé

It was felt like a duty by the author of this story to talk about Emmy Noether, the extraordinary mathematician considered the founder of modern algebra. Of course it is well known that she was born in a Jewish family in Germany, at Erlangen, and that her father, Max Noether, was himself a brilliant mathematician, but what is less known is that Emmy Noether had a wonderful character, she was full of joy and loved having fun, so she lived dividing her time between social activities and the conversations with all the outstanding mathematicians of her time who visited the University of Göttingen where David Hilbert convinced her to work, as he believed she could be useful with her knowledge of invariants. So it is an interesting voyage to explain how her original vision of algebra gave her the possibility to interact with some of the most creative minds of her time, such as Felix Klein, Albert Einstein, Helmut Hasse, Richard Courant, Bartel Van der Waerden and many others. When during the Nazism she had to abandon her country for the United States, where unluckily after a short while she died for the consequences of an apparently successful operation, Albert Einstein wrote in the New York Times that “Fraulein Noether was the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began”. So it was a genuine pleasure for the author to explain why these words were written.