She was born in
Erlangen, Bavaria, Germany. Her father,
Max Noether, was a distinguished mathematician and a professor at
Erlangen. Fritz Noether was her younger brother, and the statistician
Gottfried E. Noether was her nephew.
Noether did not show any early precocity at mathematics — as a teenager she was more interested in music and dancing.
Although Erlangen did not allow women to enroll, Emmy was able to sit in various classes. When Erlangen finally permitted women to enroll in
1904, Emmy immediately enrolled as a
mathematics student. She received her doctorate in
1907 under
Paul Gordan, and she quickly built a reputation from her publications. She moved to
Göttingen, Germany in
1915, but the
University of Göttingen refused to let her teach. Her sympathetic colleague,
David Hilbert, advertised her courses in the university's schedule under his own name. A controversy ensued, with her opponents asking what the country's soldiers would think when they returned home and were expected to learn at the feet of a woman. Allowing her on the faculty would also mean letting her have a vote in the academic senate. Said Prof. Hilbert, "I do not see that the sex of the candidate is an argument against her admission as a
Privatdozent. After all, the university senate is not a bathhouse." She was finally admitted to the faculty in the year
1919. Edmund Landau declined to describe her as the daughter of
Max Noether; but rather stated, "Max Noether was the father of Emmy Noether. Emmy is the
origin of coordinates in the Noether family."
Emmy fled Germany in
1933; she had been forbidden from teaching undergraduate classes by the
Nazi racial laws. She joined the faculty at
Bryn Mawr College in the
United States. She died at Bryn Mawr on 14 April 1935 in mysterious circumstances. Her doctor told her that she needed an operation, and she scheduled it during a college break at Bryn Mawr, without telling anyone. She perished during or shortly after the surgery. Emmy never married, and she had no relatives in the USA. Emmy was buried in the Cloisters of Thomas Great Hall on the Bryn Mawr Campus.
Her younger brother, the German mathematician Fritz Noether, fled Germany during the
Nazi rule into the
Soviet Union in 1934 and he was shot there for anti-Soviet propaganda at
Orel on Sept. 10th, 1941.
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