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A short thread on Emmy Noether and giving credit.

Felix Klein gave a lecture at the Mathematical Society of Göttingen #OTD in 1918. The title was “On Hilbert’s first note on the foundations of physics."

Klein included excerpts from letters in which he and Hilbert give priority to Emmy Noether for her results on conservation of energy in general relativity.

Noether’s contributions were not always appreciated, because some of them happened outside of formal publications, in consultation with more senior researchers, or without the fanfare of a well-known scientist announcing a result at a major meeting. (The proximate causes here were of course sexism and antisemitism.)

But her peers knew.

@mcnees At that point in time, not antisemitism with regards to Emmy Noether

@rmathematicus @mcnees Antisemitism was rife there at the time, albeit not yet quite so murderous. Also in the USA, to be fair.

Thony Christie

@BAPearlmutter @mcnees Small piece of information, I live in Emmy Noether's home town, am a historian of mathematics and something of a Noether expert.
Emmy did not identify as Jewish and in the middle of the second decade of the 20th century she would not have been and in fact was not the target of anti-semitism

@rmathematicus @mcnees Wow, a proper expert: cool! I know she was kicked from Göttingen in 1933 due to antisemitic Nazi policies, and I'd heard stories that she allowed some Nazi-supporting students into a reading group held in her house earlier than that. But perhaps that didn't extend all the way back into the 20s? I'd be curious if you have any further details about that.

@BAPearlmutter @rmathematicus I meant the causes over the course of her career, not that specific year.

@BAPearlmutter @mcnees
She was indeed removed from her teaching position in Göttingen both because she was Jewish and because she was suspected of being a communist. One time a member of the SA did indeed appear in her tutorial group and she simply ignored him and made no comment.

@BAPearlmutter @mcnees

Anti-Semitism existed in Germany already in the 19th century but Emmy Noether wasn't personally affected by it until the Nazi's came to power in 1933. She was, however, deeply affected by misogyny most of her life.

@BAPearlmutter There were a lot of bourgeois Jewish families, who didn‘t really take Hitler and the Nazi‘s seriously, they were good German citizens, who‘d fought for Germany in WWI, the antisemites couldn‘t possibly mean them. The Noethers were that type of family, established, middle class, integrated