{ bib } url: 'https://lee-phillips.org/noether' title: '*Einstein’s Tutor: The Story of Emmy Noether and the Invention of Modern Physics*' ENTRYTYPE: article ID: noetherIndex month: March year: 2024 ---
Science: “Phillips’s writing shines…everyone will learn something new from this book.”
Wall Street Journal: “captures the invigorating atmosphere of mathematics surrounding Noether in her time.”
Prospect: “extremely well-written”
Times Lit. Supp.: “His detective work reveals a complicated story…full of lessons for the international scientific community today…a reminder of the humanity of most scientists and mathematicians”.
Nature: Included in “best science picks”.
Publishers Weekly: “gives an overlooked innovator her due.”
The Next Big Idea Club: A “must read” book.
Library Journal: A “top title”.
News
Emmy Noether
She was a mathematical genius born into a society where women were not permitted to study or teach in universities: Germany at the turn of the 20th century. Consumed with a passion for math, she audited courses, then enrolled when the law changed to allow it, getting her PhD in 1907. She was not allowed to teach officially until the end of WWI, when she finally became a professor. Noether, a Jew, was removed from that job by the Nazis in 1933 and escaped to the United States.
Noether was one of the most important mathematicians of the 20th century, remaking and inventing entire fields of mathematics. According to current research mathematicians, her methods of thinking and teaching permeate the entire discipline.
Noether’s Theorem
Noether gave crucial assistance to Albert Einstein, guiding him to the completion of his General Theory of Relativity. This led to her publication in 1918 of what we now call Noether’s Theorem. This result, relating symmetries with conservation laws, provides the modern definition of energy and explains why energy is not conserved in the universe as a whole. Many scientists describe it as the most important result in all of theoretical physics. In the same work Noether invented the concept of the gauge theory; she also created the modern formulation of representation theory. The Standard Model, the current theory of the elementary particles, is an application of these ideas. Noether’s work, therefore, provides the foundation for most of fundamental modern physics.
The Book
Einstein’s Tutor tells the story of Emmy Noether’s life, describes the role of her work in the history of science, and explains why you haven’t heard of her. It’s aimed at a general audience and contains only two tiny equations, both of which you’ve seen before.
Using original research, I describe details of Noether’s life and death that have never appeared before, and trace the passage of the ideas in her Theorem from its creation down to the present day, where it’s escaped from physics and is being applied in biology, economics, quantum computing, and more.
Einstein’s Tutor was released on September 10th, 2024. It’s available at all decent bookstores and online retailers, including Amazon.
