anoether-life

[anoether-life]

19.05.1929

Emmy writes to Richard Brauer from Moscow, reporting on the hot weather:

Hier herrscht Hitze, wie wir sie in Deutschland nur kurz im Hochsommer haben; es war ein fast direkter Übergang vom Winter, dessen Kälte mich garnicht gestört hat. Ich glaube, man hat in Deutschland viel mehr gefroren als hier wo man sich zu schützen weiß.”

#emmy noether

[anoether-life]

09.05.1915

After Emmy had just moved to Göttingen to work together with Hilbert and Klein on Einstein's Theory of Relativity, her mother Ida Amalia Noether surprisingly dies at age 62 and Emmy temporarily returns to Erlangen.

#emmy noether

[anoether-life]

08.05.1919

After Göttingen's maths and science department applied for the habilitation of Emmy for the second time on February 15, the Ministry for Science, Art and National Education finally responds, saying they have no objections to Emmy's habilitation.

#emmy noether

[anoether-life]

This is the first* exemption to the standard post format, as this is the first post without a historical event from Emmy's life (at least I know of none that happened on this date). Instead, to bridge the gap until the next post (which won't come until May 8), I want to take a quick look behind the scenes.

Most of this blog would not have been possible without the work of Clark Kimberling. He has been a professor of mathematics at the University of Evansville, Indiana, since 1970 and did a lot of research about Emmy's life, corresponding both with Emmy's peers (or their descendants or other living relatives) as well as different archives (most prominently those of Bryn Mawr College and the Rockefeller Foundation) and donated copies of a lot of his letters and documents to my university's library.

An interaction which I found very interesting (and exemplary for the often times tedious work Kimberling had to go through) but which sadly didn't fit into any of the other posts was the following from correspondence with the archives of Bryn Mawr College:

Kimberling was in contact with George W. McKee, Emmy's sole Bryn Mawr Ph.D. student. In a letter to Anna Pell Wheeler, the head of Bryn Mawr's department of mathematics at the time of Emmy's stay there, there is a mention of an "E. Noether file" at Bryn Mawr, which Kimberling tries to find.

Thus, on April 4, 1968, Kimberling writes a letter to Professor John C. Oxtoby, the head of Bryn Mawr's department of mathematics at that time, asking whether there is any information about a "E. Noether file" at Bryn Mawr. On April 28, Oxtoby replies that he doesn't know anything about the file.

In research for an article about Emmy, on March 16, 1971, Kimberling writes to Janet Agnew, the Head Librarian of Bryn Mawr College, asking whether there is any information about a "E. Noether file" at Bryn Mawr. On April 26, Gertrude Reed, the Reference Librarian of Bryn Mawr College, replies to say that she also didn't find anything in the archives. She also tried to get in touch with the President’s Office, but they weren’t of much help, since "[m]ost of the material there is confidential." Kimberling also wrote to the office of Katherine McBride, the president of Bryn Mawr, directly on May 2, but apparently did not receive an answer.

On May 23, 1972, Kimberling again writes to McBride, sending a copy of his article (which was published in American Mathematical Monthly, Volume 79, Issue 2) and again asking about the "E. Noether file". On June 6 of the same year, Gertrude Reed writes to Kimberling again, saying that she finally found the "E. Noether file" in the archives, just a few months after Kimberling's article got published.

There will be a few other posts like this one that break the format and are mainly there to fill the gap between "historical" posts. Most of them will be photos of Emmy, there will be one in November giving a description of Emmy by one of her students at Bryn Mawr and another one in January about two of the places Emmy lived at in Göttingen.

*all filler posts will be tagged with #filler and most of them will just consist of photos of Emmy

#emmy noether #filler

[anoether-life]

25.04.1933

After Hitler rose to power in January 1933, the curator of the University of Göttingen receives a telegram from the Ministry of Science, Art and National Education ordering the immediate suspension of six Göttingen university lecturers, including Emmy, based on the "Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service", which came into force on 7 April 1933.

A scan of the telegram can be viewed on the website of the Kulturerbe Niedersachsen.

#emmy noether

[anoether-life]

20.04.1923

Emmy gets hired to hold Algebra lectures, starting in the summer term of 1923. The application for this had been sent out earlier but got lost for four months and was not granted retroactively.

After the end of hyperinflation in Germany, from November 1923 her pay would be 150 Mark per month, from June 1924 250 Mark per month, which in today's money would roughly be about €1,650 or $1,800.

#emmy noether

[anoether-life]

14.04.1935

It is a bit ironic that one of the first posts to be published on this blog is about Emmy's death, which was today 89 years ago (and similarly the last post will be on her birthday). This will probably also be the longest post since in addition to general information about her death I will also add parts of memorial speeches and letters from her colleagues. But let us start with details about her death first.

After the initial recovery from Emmy's uterine surgery on April 10 went rather well for the first few days, on April 14 her condition suddenly worsened. One of the doctors, Dr. James L. Lichards, described it to Marion Edwards Park (the president of Bryn Mawr College) in a letter from April 24 as follows:

At operation the pelvic tumor was found to be a large ovarian cyst the size of a large cantaloupe. [...] During the early morning of her fourth post-operative day she developed a circulatory collapse from which she seemed to rally under treatment. At noon on that day she suddenly lapsed from consciousness to complete coma with loss of reflexes and a rise of temperature from 102 degrees to 108 degrees. Dr. David Riesman, who saw her in consultation, was of the opinion that, as a part of Dr. Noether’s general circulatory collapse, a blood vessel had ruptured in the region of the vital centers in her head which had caused her sudden relapse at a time when she seemed to be rallying. From that point, Dr. Noether rapidly failed in spite of every effort to save her.

According to Dr. Brooke M. Anspach, another one of Emmy's doctors, it was in fact very likely that Emmy would have died in the near future, if not from complications with this surgery. In her letter to Marion Park from April 15 she states it as follows:

If it is any comfort I may tell you that we have every reason to believe that the outcome was impossible to avoid. Dr. Noether evidently had some unrecognizable disability which would have made itself suddenly manifest without any more exciting cause than her usual routine of work. Unfortunately we see every once in awhile one of our friends apparently in good health suddenly stricken; it would have been the same with her some time. Without doubt the operative procedure hastened it but of course the operation was necessary and if the tumor had not been removed it alone would have been sufficient to have cause her death.

Emmy's death came as a shock to everyone, especially since Bryn Mawr, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Princeton were in deep talks to transform Emmy's temporary appointment at Bryn Mawr into a permanent position. Marion Park held a smaller funeral service at her home with some of Emmy's friends and colleagues on April 17 and there was a larger memorial service in Goodhart Hall, Bryn Mawr College, on April 26, 1935.

There are two memorial accounts I would like to highlight here, the first of which is from a letter by Albert Einstein to the New York Times, which was printed in the Times on May 3, 1935:

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. [...] Her unselfish, significant work over a period of many years was rewarded by new rulers of Germany with a dismissal, which cost her the means of maintaining her simple life and the opportunity to carry on her mathematical studies.

The second one is from an obituary printed in the Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bulletin from May 1935:

Professor Brauer, in speaking recently of Miss Noether’s powerful influence professionally and personally among the young scholars who surrounded her in Göttingen, said that they were called the Noether family, and that when she had to leave Göttingen, she dreamed of building again somewhere what was destroyed then. We realize now with pride and thankfulness that we saw the beginning of a new ‘Noether family’ here. To Miss Noether her work was as inevitable and natural as breathing. A background for living taken for granted; but that work was only the core of her relation to students. She lived with them and for them in a perfectly unselfconscious way. She looked on the world with direct friendliness and unfeigned interest, and she wanted them to do the same. Mathematical meetings at the University of Pennsylvania, at Princeton, at New York, began to watch for the little group, slowly growing, which always brought something of the freshness and buoyance of its leader.

After Emmy's body was cremated, her ashes were placed under the walkway around the cloisters of M. Carey Thomas Library at Bryn Mawr College.

#emmy noether

[anoether-life]

10.04.1935

After doctors at Bryn Mawr Hospital had discovered a tumour in Emmy's pelvis, they initially ordered two days of rest, in fear of complications from surgery. As this didn't help, Emmy still underwent uterine surgery.

#emmy noether

[anoether-life]

06.04.1922

After having worked as a private lecturer for about four years, Emmy gets the job title “associate professor”, though this changes nothing about her legal position and is a “title without means”.

06.04.1935

Emmy writes her will:

Sollte mir etwas zustoßen, so bestimme ich, 1) Von meinen Büchern sollen meine mathematischen Freunde Andenken bekommen. 2) Von meinen hiesigen Möbeln soll Mrs. Hicks etwas zur Erinnerung haben. 3) Ebenso soll Frau Bruns etwas von meinen Möbeln haben, die bei ihr in Göttingen, Friedensstr. 2 stehen. 4) Mrs. Hicks und Frau Bruns sollen beide etwas in Geld bekommen, weil sie beide so gut für mich gesorgt haben. 5) Die zuständige Devisenstelle soll um Erlaubnis ersucht werden daß die Zinsen aus meiner Hypothek Riedel in Mannheim während der nächsten Jahre ausgezahlt werden an Frau Marie Deuring, Göttingen, Hospitalstraße 3a, solange bis ihre Kinder soviel verdienen daß keine Schwierigkeiten mehr entstehen.

#emmy noether

[anoether-life]

Who was Emmy Noether?

Amalie Emmy Noether (1882 - 1935) was a German, Jewish mathematician and is sometimes called the 'Mother of Abstract Algebra'. She started working in Erlangen and later moved to Göttingen, where in 1919 she became the first woman ever to habilitate in mathematics in Germany. When the Nazis rose to power in 1933, Emmy moved to Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, where she continued working and finally died in 1935.

What is this blog?

I am currently attending a university lecture on the history of mathematics and as an examination performance we were free to choose any topic and medium. And because I am both a Tumblr girly and have massive Noether brainworms of course I decided to make a Tumblr blog.

Starting in April 2024, there will be posts about what happened on that specific day in Emmy's life. Of course there will not be a post every day, but I will try to make as many as possible (and feasible).

#anoether life #emmy noether #pinned post