I’d buy that DVD, and put it on the shelf right next to Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
Ooh, one of my favorite movies. I love those documentaries that detail little known facts about famous people. ![]()
I believe you, but I’m surprised. The last time I taught (undergraduate) Abstract Algebra, a couple of years ago, Noether’s Isomorphism Theorems were central to much of what we did and I think I drilled her name into my students’ heads pretty thoroughly. These are results you need to know if you’re going to do anything with groups or rings. This is junior or senior level stuff for math majors in my school, but I could see other majors not getting to it.
I am astonished to learn just now that those isomorphism theorems were Noether’s. In any case, there is no real depth to them and their proofs are trivial. The other things I mentioned above were much deeper. And I taught modern algebra many times in my career.
I think when I first learned them it wasn’t with anyone’s name associated to them, which may go to the point of this thread. But I wanted my students to know about Noether, so I quite deliberately attached her name.
And no, they’re not deep, but they’re foundational and beginning algebra students need them drummed into their heads until they’re as second nature as they are to you and me.
Ours was a lot of calculus, then we had the choice of differential equations or linear algebra, and finally discrete and combinatorial mathematics.
But yeah, it’s the sort of thing you have to be a math or maybe physics major to be exposed to Noether. In my field, it’s like wondering why people in the wider world don’t know who Claude Shannon is. His work underpins pretty much everything technological we use these days, but his work was in information theory, and is foundational for stuff like cryptography and data compression, among many things.
I figure every field of study has someone like this- someone whose work is deeply foundational, but who isn’t popularly known.