Skip Navigation

We are closed today.

Elizabeth A.Sackler Center for Feminist Art

Emmy Noether

b. 1882, Erlangen, Germany; d. 1935, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania

Emmy Noether was a professor of mathematics at the Mathematical Institution of Erlangen (1908–15) and at Göttingen University (1915–33), where she taught for many years without pay because she was a woman. Noether contributed two important theorems to Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity in 1918 and laid the foundation for modern abstract algebra with a 1921 paper. In the Nazi purge of Jews, she was dismissed from her position at Göttingen University in 1933. With the aid of the Emergency Committee to Aid Displaced German Scholars, she secured a professorship at Bryn Mawr, a women’s college in Pennsylvania, and held this position from the fall of 1933 until her death in 1935.