Too Many Bad Articles About Emmy Noether

I apologise in advance for all the whining, but I need to get this off my chest.

I recently wrote a book (available at all fine online bookstores) about the great Emmy Noether and the importance of her Theorem on the history of science. One of my goals was to increase the public awareness of this great mathematician and to encourage a more accurate understanding of the development of physics over the past century. So I should be happy to see the regular appearance of articles in magazines, newspapers, and on personal websites (and newfangled contraptions like MediumStack or whatever it’s called) about Emmy Noether, Noether’s Theorem, and whatnot.

And I would be overjoyed, were it not for the fact that many, maybe most, of these articles are just garbage.

My book has over 700 endnotes. It’s written for a popular audience (you’ll love it — did I mention it’s on sale right now?), but I want my readers to know that I’m not just making things up, that every assertion in the book is supported, often by pointers to primary or archival source material.

Not so with these garbage articles. I just suffered through a new one in a prominent online publication supposedly dedicated to science, philosophy, and big ideas. It’s run by a nonprofit, too, so I guess we can assume that their motivations were pure and they were not just fishing for clicks.

The article contains a long string of “facts” about Emmy Noether, some of which I know to be false, others which certainly seem dubious. None of these are supported with a link or reference. They appear to be nothing but fantasies on the part of the author.

The piece is not confined to made-up Emmy Noether facts. It also attempts, passionately, to explain the meaning and importance of her work for physics, and something more general about the relationship between physics and mathematics. None of that made any sense to me. The explanations were strings of meaningless phrases, often so ludicrous that I can’t believe they meant anything to the author.

Should I just chill out? Isn’t it a net win if Noether’s name is more widely circulated, even if false ideas about her work and her life circulate with it?

Maybe. But I can’t shake the old-fashioned idea that people should be educated about the actual history of civilization and the people who made it happen.