There is no serious study that has found a gender bias regarding our brain’s capacity for mathematics. If for many years the world of mathematics resembled a diocesan seminary in the post-war period, it was not due to any cause of biological origin, but rather because society prevented women’s access to science careers. A good example of this is the case of mathematician Emmy Noether.
Amalie Emmy Noether was the daughter of a German Jewish merchant family. Her father had taught himself mathematics while working in the family business, earning a doctorate in Heidelberg and obtaining a position as a university professor in the city of Erlangen. Her brother Fritz Noether was a renowned applied mathematician, and her older brother, Alfred, earned a doctorate in Chemistry, although he died at an early age.
When she was young, Emmy did not show the same inclination for science as almost her entire family, becoming more interested in languages and music. In 1903, a change in German law allowed women access to university studies. Emmy attended the University of Göttingen as a student and found her vocation listening to the classes of the astronomer Karl Schwarzschild (the one who had postulated the existence of black holes based on Einstein’s equations) or the great mathematicians David Hilbert or Hermann Minkowski. In 1907 she received her doctorate under the direction of Paul Gordan, although she was dissatisfied with her work at the time; years later she described her thesis as rubbish.
She was the second woman to obtain a doctorate in Mathematics in Germany, where women were allowed access to university studies, but not to the teaching staff. Emmy Noether began researching and teaching at the University of Erlangen, occasionally substituting for her father, but without being able to receive any type of emolument. However, her ability for mathematics was beginning to be known and valued. Two of her professors in Göttingen tried to offer her a teaching position at her university, but, again, she was denied access to the faculty due to her condition as a woman. She continued researching in Göttingen, but without being able to earn a salary and had to take care of her own maintenance. She could only teach unannounced classes, replacing David Hilbert. Despite these precarious conditions, Noether made her greatest contribution to science during her stay in Göttingen, Noether’s theorem, which states that any conservation law in physics proceeds from a symmetry. It may seem simple, but it is one of the bases of modern theoretical physics and many authors compare its importance to that of the Pythagorean theorem for geometry.
In 1919, after the November Revolution, he was allowed to take the qualification exam to become a university teacher, which he successfully passed. Three years later she obtained special permission to be a professor at the University of Göttingen, but without pay. The following year, finally, she was promoted to professor of Algebra and received official compensation, after almost 20 years of career at the expense of her own resources and already being considered one of the most important German mathematicians. At this time she made important contributions to the field of algebra that are studied in all textbooks.
In the 1930s she received recognition and awards for her work as a mathematician. In 1933, the rise of the Nazis caused her to be expelled from the university because of her Jewish status. For a while she continued teaching at her house. She eventually emigrated to the United States, where she found a position at Bryn Mawr College of Pennsylvania and was able to resume her scientific career. But for a short time. Two years later she died as a result of complications arising from an operation to remove an ovarian cyst. She was 53 years old. A short life, but enough to develop some of the most beautiful theorems in mathematics.
JM Mulet is a professor of Biotechnology.
Emmy’s was not the only premature end in her family
—His brother Fritz was also purged by the racial laws of the Third Reich from his position as a university professor. Of leftist ideas, he emigrated to the Soviet Union, where he obtained a position at Tomsk State University. In 1937, during the great Stalinist purge, he was convicted of espionage and sabotage, and later sentenced to death, accused of making anti-Soviet propaganda. He was shot on September 10, 1941 in the Medvedev Forest Massacre. His body was never located. In 1988, the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union ruled that his conviction was unfounded and he was rehabilitated. A little late…
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