Expulsion from
Göttingen by the Third Reich
When Adolf Hitler became the German Reichskanzler in January
1933, Nazi activity around the country increased dramatically. At the
University of Göttingen the German Student Association led the attack on the
"un-German spirit" attributed to Jews and was aided by a privatdozent
named Werner Weber, a former student of Noether. Antisemitic attitudes created
a climate hostile to Jewish professors. One young protester reportedly
demanded: "Aryan students want Aryan mathematics and not Jewish
mathematics."
One of the first actions of Hitler's administration was the
Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service which removed Jews
and politically suspect government employees (including university professors)
from their jobs unless they had "demonstrated their loyalty to
Germany" by serving in World War I. In April 1933 Noether received a
notice from the Prussian Ministry for Sciences, Art, and Public Education which
read: "On the basis of paragraph 3 of the Civil Service Code of 7 April
1933, I hereby withdraw from you the right to teach at the University of
Göttingen." Several of Noether's
colleagues, including Max Born and Richard Courant, also had their positions
revoked.
Noether accepted the decision calmly, providing support for
others during this difficult time. Hermann Weyl later wrote that "Emmy
Noether—her courage, her frankness, her unconcern about her own fate, her
conciliatory spirit—was in the midst of all the hatred and meanness, despair
and sorrow surrounding us, a moral solace." Typically, Noether remained focused on
mathematics, gathering students in her apartment to discuss class field theory.
When one of her students appeared in the uniform of the Nazi paramilitary
organization Sturmabteilung (SA), she showed no sign of agitation and,
reportedly, even laughed about it later. This, however, was before the bloody events of
Kristallnacht in 1938, and their praise from Propaganda Minister Joseph
Goebbels.
Refuge at Bryn Mawr
and Princeton, in America
As dozens of newly unemployed professors began searching for
positions outside of Germany, their colleagues in the United States sought to
provide assistance and job opportunities for them. Albert Einstein and Hermann
Weyl were appointed by the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, while
others worked to find a sponsor required for legal immigration. Noether was
contacted by representatives of two educational institutions: Bryn Mawr
College, in the United States, and Somerville College at the University of
Oxford, in England. After a series of negotiations with the Rockefeller
Foundation, a grant to Bryn Mawr was approved for Noether and she took a
position there, starting in late 1933.
At Bryn Mawr, Noether met and befriended Anna Wheeler, who
had studied at Göttingen just before Noether arrived there. Another source of
support at the college was the Bryn Mawr president, Marion Edwards Park, who
enthusiastically invited mathematicians in the area to "see Dr. Noether in
action!" Noether and a small team
of students worked quickly through van der Waerden's 1930 book Moderne Algebra
I and parts of Erich Hecke's Theorie der algebraischen Zahlen (Theory of
algebraic numbers).
In 1934, Noether began lecturing at the Institute for Advanced
Study in Princeton upon the invitation of Abraham Flexner and Oswald Veblen.
She also worked with and supervised Abraham Albert and Harry Vandiver. However, she remarked about Princeton
University that she was not welcome at "the men's university, where nothing
female is admitted".
Her time in the United States was pleasant, surrounded as
she was by supportive colleagues and absorbed in her favorite subjects. In the summer of 1934 she briefly returned to
Germany to see Emil Artin and her brother Fritz before he left for Tomsk.
Although many of her former colleagues had been forced out of the universities,
she was able to use the library as a "foreign scholar".
Death
In April 1935 doctors discovered a tumor in Noether's
pelvis. Worried about complications from surgery, they ordered two days of bed
rest first. During the operation they discovered an ovarian cyst "the size
of a large cantaloupe". Two smaller
tumors in her uterus appeared to be benign and were not removed, to avoid
prolonging surgery. For three days she appeared to convalesce normally, and she
recovered quickly from a circulatory collapse on the fourth. On 14 April she
fell unconscious, her temperature soared to 109 °F (42.8 °C), and she died.
"[I]t is not easy to say what had occurred in Dr. Noether", one of
the physicians wrote. "It is possible that there was some form of unusual
and virulent infection, which struck the base of the brain where the heat
centers are supposed to be located."
A few days after Noether's death her friends and associates
at Bryn Mawr held a small memorial service at College President Park's house.
Hermann Weyl and Richard Brauer traveled from Princeton and spoke with Wheeler
and Taussky about their departed colleague. In the months that followed,
written tributes began to appear around the globe: Albert Einstein joined van
der Waerden, Weyl, and Pavel Alexandrov in paying their respects. Her body was
cremated and the ashes interred under the walkway around the cloisters of the
M. Carey Thomas Library at Bryn Mawr.
Contributions to
mathematics and physics
Noether's work in abstract algebra and topology was
influential in mathematics, while in physics, Noether's theorem has
consequences for theoretical physics and dynamical systems. She showed an acute
propensity for abstract thought, which allowed her to approach problems of
mathematics in fresh and original ways. Her friend and colleague Hermann Weyl
described her scholarly output in three epochs:
Emmy Noether's scientific production fell into three clearly
distinct epochs:
(1) the period of relative dependence, 1907–1919
(2) the investigations
grouped around the general theory of ideals 1920–1926
(3) the study of the non-commutative algebras,
their representations by linear transformations, and their application to the
study of commutative number fields and their arithmetics— Weyl 1935
In the first epoch (1907–1919), Noether dealt primarily with
differential and algebraic invariants, beginning with her dissertation under
Paul Gordan. Her mathematical horizons broadened, and her work became more
general and abstract, as she became acquainted with the work of David Hilbert,
through close interactions with a successor to Gordan, Ernst Sigismund Fischer.
After moving to Göttingen in 1915, she produced her work for physics, the two
Noether's theorems.
In the second epoch (1920–1926), Noether devoted herself to
developing the theory of mathematical rings.
In the third epoch (1927–1935), Noether focused on
noncommutative algebra, linear transformations, and commutative number fields.
Although the results of Noether's first epoch were
impressive and useful, her fame among mathematicians rests more on the
groundbreaking work she did in her second and third epochs, as noted by Hermann
Weyl and B.L. van der Waerden in their obituaries of her.
In these epochs, she was not merely applying ideas and
methods of earlier mathematicians; rather, she was crafting new systems of
mathematical definitions that would be used by future mathematicians. In
particular, she developed a completely new theory of ideals in rings,
generalizing earlier work of Richard Dedekind. She is also renowned for
developing ascending chain conditions; a simple finiteness condition that
yielded powerful results in her hands. Such conditions and the theory of ideals
enabled Noether to generalize many older results and to treat old problems from
a new perspective, such as elimination theory and the algebraic varieties that
had been studied by her father.
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