I’ve got a BS in a STEM field with a minor in math. And consider myself decently well-read as an amateur science enthusiast of wide-ranging interests.
I recognize the name and could give at least a sentence, if not a couple paragraphs, on the significant contributions of all your historical names and Wiles, but not Perelman nor Tao.
I first heard of the name Noether via this thread.
Sexism is a right bastard and has been for a very long time. Would that it were not so.
IMO Yep.
Just as there’s famous for being famous, which is a self-reinforcing upward spiral of increasing notoriety (for good or ill), there’s obscure for being obscure. Which is a self-reinforcing downward spiral leading from obscurity towards being forgotten completely.
Yeah. Despite what I said earlier about Noether not discovering or building many concrete things having an impact on her fame, Einstein discovered or built less than the several people who could reasonably be said to be the second most famous scientist of the 20th century (at least amongst those who have been dead long enough to determine if their fame will last.) He’s now ascended into self-reinforcing fame that won’t go away for a long time due to his recognizability and use as a metaphor.
Good example illustrating how, these days, it is often up to the PR savvy mathematicians (are we talking about mathematicians?) themselves. Tao, an excellent mathematician, has a blog, makes sure his name keeps appearing in the news as well as around the academic world, etc., and he is definitely not the only one, while Perelman, an excellent mathematician, has made quite sure to do the exact opposite (he is not so unique in that respect: consider Grothendieck, one of, if not the greatest, mathematician of the 20th century— he is dead now— and others we could name).
I personally am far away from academia. I have a nephew in his mid 30s who’s a tenure track professor at a big name school in his field with a solid publishing history behind him.
He is all in that self-promotion is simply part of the (modern?) academic game. The folks with names get the good jobs, get the grants, get the tenure, etc. The folks battling in obscurity get bupkiss.
To get back to the OP, the strange thing is that she is not prominent even among women mathematicians. Note that the Einstein obit did not describe her as one of the greatest female mathematicians since the education of women was permitted, but as one of the greatest since that era. If I had to name the top 5 mathematicians of the 20th c., I would probably place her 3rd, after Grothendieck and Hilbert. But the astonishing thing is that the OP described a series of posters of famous women scientists and she wasn’t among them, while she would top any accurate ranking.
I have undergrad degrees in math and physics, and I have never heard of her. Reading snippets of her bio, I don’t really see a reason why I would hear about her.
That gets back to what I suggested in my first post, that learning about (say) Noetherian rings and Hilbert’s basis theorem is not equivalent to hearing about or knowing anything about a “Noether” or a “Hilbert”— it is just a name.
Did you study modern algebra? Reading her Wikipedia article, i see why she isn’t a household name, because a lot is her work was very abstract, so it’s hard to describe to a layman. But it was pretty central to the development of modern algebra, and I’m surprised i haven’t heard more about her.
Of course, Einstein’s work is also hard to describe to a layman, and he’s very well known.
Quite right. At the same time, learning about “(say) Noetherian rings and Hilbert’s basis theorem” should at least cause you to become aware of the names Noether & Hilbert. Such that you know they were people, even if you know nothing else about them.
But what seems to have happened is that Hilbert became a name that students and hence next generations of professors recognize and Noether did not. Her contributions are still taught today, but without attribution.
I’d suggest maybe it was a difference between naming things with the person’s name itself vs using the “-ian” suffix, but ISTM most folks who have any idea what a “Hamiltonian” is also know it’s named for somebody named “Hamilton” even if they know nothing else of their work or even their gender. Folks will recognize e.g. both “Gödel’s incompleteness theorem” and “Gödelian whatever…”.
Which leads me to a tentative theory that maybe Noether just had the bad fortune that her last name happened to make “noetherian” sound more like jargon than an attribution.
While reading this thread I had in mind the math term “Abelian group” from my number theory class decades ago. It occurred to me I don’t, and probably never did, know whether that term is a coinage or an homage. Wiki informs me it’s named for the Norwegian mathematician Niels Henrik Abel - Wikipedia. Another mathematician with significant contributions who seems to be forgotten as a name.
If I had to guess, it’s because Noether’s work centered on very abstract mathematics that are unknown to the general public, even those who have taken a fair bit of math in their academic careers.
I mean, I’ve got a computer science degree and something like 18 credit hours of collegiate level math courses, and looking at the wiki page for Noether, that stuff she worked on is well beyond anything we even came close to covering in school.
Contrast this with say… Marie Curie and Ada Lovelace, both of whom worked in categories that are a lot more familiar to the general public in recent history (nuclear physics and computing), and as a result, they’re more familiar to the general public. I’d even go so far as to say that Curie and Lovelace are more well known than a lot of Noether’s male counterparts like Wiener, Alexandrov, and Dieudonne, for the same reasons.
It’s not a concerted plot to deprive her of due recognition; it’s the fickle and ever-changing nature of fame.
I’m aware of Emmy Noether from being exposed to Noetherian rings in grad school. But I had no idea until mentioning her in a thread on another forum earlier this week that her rings had significant implications in physics.
Absent grad school in math, I’d have only known Riemann on account of Riemann sums in Calc 1, Godel on account of Godel, Escher, Bach, and Erdos from at least one article in a ‘science for the non-scientist’ type magazine (remember magazines?). Been familiar with Pascal’s Triangle since childhood, and I remember reading about Gauss and Euler in a Time-Life book on mathematics for kids.
Other than that, I only know those names from grad school. Except Wiles, who made the regular news for proving Fermat’s Last Theorem after I was already out of grad school. The other two contemporary mathematicians, I never heard of before reading this thread.
(Wonder what Fermat’s second-to-last theorem was? )
I’m familiar with some other relatively recent names from my graduate study, like Laszlo Lovasz, who proved a whole bunch of cool theorems in graph theory, mostly back in the 1970s and 1980s. But I wouldn’t expect anyone to know who he is that didn’t actually take a course in graph theory.
I would maintain that, in the relevant sense, knowing about Noether’s or Hilbert’s work is knowing about the people. What they’re famous for (to the extent that they are) is their work. Sure, most people don’t know what their favorite foods are, or what pets they have, or any of those other details we know about our friends, but then, most people don’t know that of any famous person.
As to her work being too arcane for most folks, that’s true of her pure-math work (the significance of which I didn’t even know until this thread), and it’s true of the techniques behind the proof of her Symmetry Theorem, but I’d say that the result of the Symmetry Theorem is just as accessible as anything else in physics or math: There’s a direct correspondence between symmetries of nature and conservation laws. Conservation laws are a very powerful tool for understanding physics, and so you can understand a lot about a physical system by learning its symmetries.
If you pay me a dump truck full of money, I will be glad to polish that screenplay in which a plucky Emmy Noether saves the world by assembling a team to foil the dread cultists of Yog-Sothoth. Only she can ultimately uphold the integrity of space-time itself. Got to make her at least as famous as Harry Potter.
There’s another example of a woman who didn’t become famous for her scientific discovery until towards the end of her life and whose career in another field was much more famous until then - Hedy Lamarr. You can read about how she invented frequency hopping (and why it’s important) in her Wikipedia entry. In 1974, this was still so little known that nobody was bothered by the jokes in the movie Blazing Saddles about a character named Hedley Lamarr. The common opinion of her during her acting career was that she was stunningly beautiful, very smart, and not that great an actress.
She was definitely already known as an actress by the early-mid-1930s, but, yes, random people are probably going to consume films more than they read her publications. Hence my idea…
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