Yesterday’s featured Wikipedia article was on the German mathematician Emmy Noether. She had a fascinating, challenging life, and fled the Nazi regime to settle at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania.
There are so many interesting paths to follow with her story.
For our 61st episode, we bring back the presenter who appeared in our very first podcast episode, writer and translator Karen Margolis. Drawing from her own history in higher mathematics, Karen ably tells the tale of Germany’s Emmy Noether, who developed key theorems in theoretical physics and made important contributions to abstract algebra.
Excluded from academic positions in Germany as a woman, she worked unpaid and under other lecturers’ names. Once she was finally allowed to teach in 1919, she had only 14 years until the Nazis banned her from universities, as a Jew. In American exile, she taught at the women’s college Bryn Mawr.
As I was listening to the podcast, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up as I heard:
The philosopher Hannah Arendt, shown here, later gave a striking description of what Jewish and anti-fascist academics like Emmy and herself faced as Hitler’s persecution threatened the existence of Germany’s Jewish population and the political opposition:
This is what she said:
“You know about the idea of conforming, people accepting Nazi politics. What it meant was that our friends conformed! The problem for us personally was not what our enemies did, but what our friends did. Our intellectual friends. The rush to conform actually occurred fairly voluntarily, or at least, people weren’t acting under the threat of terror yet. It was like an empty room taking shape around you.”
Bryn Mawr College provided a welcoming home for Noether during the last two years of her life. 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.
Sadly, Emmy Noether’s was cut short by a post-surgical infection.
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, Noether fell unconscious, her temperature soared to 109 °F (42.8 °C), and she died.[…]
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.
Semi-Sequitur: The Cloisters at the Old Library
The library encloses a large open courtyard called “The Cloisters”, which is the site of the College’s traditional Lantern Night ceremony. The cremated remains of M. Carey Thomas and Emmy Noether are in the courtyard cloister. According to her 1985 graduation address, alumna Katharine Hepburn used to go skinny dipping in the Cloisters’ fountain.
A popular tradition is for undergraduates to skinny dip before graduating, and conveniently the fountain contains chlorinated water.
Bryn Mawr College This Sunday [April 13th, 2025], community members gathered in remembrance of Emmy Noether, a pioneering mathematician who joined the Bryn Mawr faculty in 1933 after fleeing persecution in Germany. The day included programming about Noether’s life and legacy as the most influential female mathematician of the twentieth century. Noether’s resting place in the Cloisters was rededicated with a brief Jewish ceremony, and a new bronze plaque was unveiled at the burial site.
To learn more about Noether, head to https://mawr.life/DKP9 to read an article from Associate Professor of German and German Studies Qinna Shen “A Refugee Scholar from Nazi Germany: Emmy Noether and Bryn Mawr College.”
You can read about Prof. Noether’s first and second theorems on Wikipedia.
Topology
A continuous deformation (homotopy) of a coffee cup into a doughnut (torus) and back
As noted by Hermann Weyl in his obituary, Noether’s contributions to topology illustrate her generosity with ideas and how her insights could transform entire fields of mathematics. In topology, mathematicians study the properties of objects that remain invariant even under deformation, properties such as their connectedness. An old joke is that “a topologist cannot distinguish a donut from a coffee mug”, since they can be continuously deformed into one another.
The math is way beyond us. BUT…. we were able to find a clever YouTube video of a math professor with small children. Chris Ferrie, author of popular children’s books including Quantum Physics for Babies, explains the basic concepts of Emmy Noether’s theorem to his sons, Max and Wes.
Imagining Happy Times for Prof. Neother
We were only able to find a few photos of Prof. Noether, but Elder G used her/his skills to help us imagine her during happier times, surrounded by her students on the Bryn Mawr campus.
