Emmy Noether was born on March 23, 1882 in Erlangen, Germany. The oldest of four children, she grew up in the university environment where her father was a math professor. Prior to the 20th century, females in most countries were discouraged from pursuing university education. However, a few brilliant women throughout history have been able to transcend the cultural barriers and make significant contributions to mathematics. Emmy Noether was such a person. By 1907 Emmy had completed her doctoral dissertation, and by 1916, she was emerging as one of the great mathematicians of her time and delivering lectures at Gottingen–the center of European mathematics.
The rise of Adolph Hitler in the 1930’s prompted Emmy and many other prominent mathematicians to emigrate to the United States. In 1933, Emmy accepted a professorship at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. She had finally achieved her life’s goal and was approaching the peak of her creative powers in 1935, when she died following complications from routine surgery. In a eulogy written for the New York Times, Albert Einstein wrote,
In the judgment of most competent living mathematicians, Fräulein Noether was the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began.
One of Emmy Noether’s most significant achievements was the development of algebraic entities called ideals. In the set of non-negative integers, the set of all integers that yield a remainder of 0 when divided by 7 is an ideal. Similarly, in the set of all polynomials, the set of all polynomials that yield a remainder of 0 when divided by a polynomial such as x2 + 1 is an ideal. Using this concept of an ideal, Emmy Noether was able to extend theorems about integers to more general and abstract algebraic structures.
