Emmy Noether

[Foxbat]

During my attempts to educate myself a bit on Quantum Physics, I came across references to this lady and her mathematical contributions regarding symmetry(among many other things mathematical).

After reading a bit more about her (and having never heard of her), I wondered if she would be so anonymous if she had been male.

Emmy Noether - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Stephen Palmer]

No. Alas.

 

[sknox]

Well, the article says she was world-famous, so I'm not sure how anonymous that would make her. It also says she is consistently ranked as being among the top mathematicians of the 20thc. Maybe it's more that non-mathematicians tend not to hear much about famous mathematicians.

 

[olive]

It seems to me that when they are male, these figures get promoted in and outside their own fields, back and forth, esp. in pop culture. But female figures do not get that treatment. We have started to hear about most of the female figures in STEM relatively recently, but for some reason -political correctness?- people generally act in mainstream as if they have always been known. Or maybe it is just my impression with the social media.

For example, has anyone over 50, heard about Henrietta Levitt before 2000s? Wiki is not a good source, but the oldest thing written on her goes back to 1994 and 97 and then starts from 2005. When she was nominated for 1926 Nobel Prize in Physics, she had been dead for 4 years. And his research was signed and published by a man. The 'name' 'Pickard's Harem' is still more famous than her. And that group includes other successful names.

 

[Foxbat]

It seems to me that when they are male, these figures get promoted in and outside their own fields

I think you've hit the nail on the head there.

 

[Venusian Broon]

I have vague memories of hearing Noether's theorem, but I had to look it up to remind myself what it was.

No, science was shamefully a boys club pre-1980s or even longer. Look at the history of 19th/20th century science and you do find women working at the cutting edge of all areas, but usually being frozen out by colleagues and institutions. Rarely were women given the time or funding to continue their research properly (or as @olive points out, Male bosses did/could obstruct or take the credit for the women's work)

What it meant was that other men working in the field would easily catch up and overtake these women and therefore be more well known because they would just discover more and get their names on the papers.

Purely a personal anecdote, when I went to do a PhD in Cambridge in 1992, one of the highest rated institutions for science in the world, I was shocked to discover that my college had only started to admit women in 1980. (There were women's only colleges, and had been for some time, but don't tell me that blocking women to all the prestigious colleges didn't make a huge difference.)