Emmy Noether
The greatest (female) mathematician of all time … and maybe more.
see also Emilie du Chatelet
see also conservation of energy here (AI) and here
The most interesting part of her work to me is the way she used symmetry to disprove the Conservation of Energy theory but it’s also amazing the number of Wikipedia people she met during her life- many were her students.
She proved Noether's first and second theorems, which are fundamental in mathematical physics.[4] Noether was described by Pavel Alexandrov, Albert Einstein, Jean Dieudonné, Hermann Weyl and Norbert Wiener as the most important woman in the history of mathematics.
At the time, women were largely excluded from academic positions. In 1915, she was invited by David Hilbert and Felix Klein to join the mathematics department at the University of Göttingen, a world-renowned center of mathematical research. The philosophical faculty objected, and she spent four years lecturing under Hilbert's name.
Under the supervision of Paul Gordan, she wrote her dissertation,
she studied at the University of Göttingen, attending lectures given by astronomer Karl Schwarzschild and mathematicians Hermann Minkowski, Otto Blumenthal, Felix Klein, and David Hilbert.[27]
American physicists Leon M. Lederman and Christopher T. Hill argue in their book Symmetry and the Beautiful Universe that Noether's theorem is "certainly one of the most important mathematical theorems ever proved in guiding the development of modern physics, possibly on a par with the Pythagorean theorem".
Noether taught under his successors, Erhard Schmidt and Ernst Fischer, who took over from the former in 1911.[39] According to her colleague Hermann Weyl and her biographer Auguste Dick, Fischer was an important influence on Noether, in particular by introducing her to the work of David Hilbert.
In 1924, a young Dutch mathematician, Bartel Leendert van der Waerden, arrived at the University of Göttingen. He immediately began working with Noether, who provided invaluable methods of abstract conceptualization.
Noether worked closely with Emil Artin, Richard Brauer and Helmut Hasse on noncommutative algebras
Göttingen had become a major hub of mathematical and physical research. Russian mathematicians Pavel Alexandrov and Pavel Urysohn were the first of several visitors in 1923.[
In Göttingen, Noether supervised more than a dozen doctoral students;[46] most were with Edmund Landau and others as she was not allowed to supervise dissertations on her own.[80][81] Her first was Grete Hermann, who defended her dissertation in February 1925.[82] She is best remembered for her work on the foundations of quantum mechanics, but her dissertation was considered an important contribution to ideal theory.
Noether then supervised Werner Weber[87] and Jakob Levitzki,
Other Noether Boys included Max Deuring, Hans Fitting, Ernst Witt, Chiungtze C. Tsen and Otto Schilling.
…her close work with Wolfgang Krull, who greatly advanced commutative algebra with his Hauptidealsatz and his dimension theory for commutative rings.[109] Another is Gottfried Köthe, who contributed to the development of the theory of hypercomplex quantities using Noether and Krull's methods.
