Noether, Emmy (1882–1935)

German mathematician who became one of the leading figures in abstract algebra. Modern work in the field of a general theory of ideals dates from her papers of the early 1920s.

Noether was born in Erlangen, the daughter of mathematician Max Noether. Despite a rule barring women from university study, she was awarded a doctorate from Erlangen in 1907 for a thesis on algebraic invariants. But as a woman she could not hold a post in the university faculty. She persisted with her research independently and at the request of mathematician David Hilbert was invited to lecture at Göttingen in 1915. There she worked with Hilbert on problems arising from Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, and in 1922 became associate professor. She remained at Göttingen until the Nazi purge of Jewish university staff in 1933. The rest of her life was spent as professor of mathematics at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, USA.

Noether first made her mark as a mathematician with a 1920 paper on noncommutative fields (where the order in which the elements are combined affects the result). For the next few years she worked on the establishment and systematization of a theory of ideals, and introduced the concept of primary ideals. After 1927 she returned to the subject of noncommutative algebras, her chief investigations being conducted into linear transformations of noncommutative algebras and their structure.