Emmy Noether Trivia Quiz

Answer: University of Erlangen

Bologna is in Italy and Granada is in Spain. The Cologne University of Applied Sciences is German, but was founded in 1971, long after Emmy's era.

Emmy attended Erlangen, now known as the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg. Depicted is its Kollegienhaus, an old building which was present during Emmy's time there.

Answer: Quadratic

"Quadratic" in mathematics is used to refer to squared values, or values of degree 2. A quadratic expression like the one in the photo is a collection of terms where the largest power the variable is raised to is 2.

Emmy later described her dissertation as "crap", though it was positively spoken of by mathematicians of the day.

Answer: Ernst Fischer

Ernst Fischer was an Austrian mathematician who studied and worked in Austria, Switzerland and Germany. His area of mathematics - analysis - is an extension of calculus that studies sequences, functions and limits. For instance, an analytic fact is that the limit of the infinite sequence 1, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, ... (where the term-to-term rule is halving) is 0.

Bobby Fischer is one of the most famous and successful chess players of all time, though infamous for his erratic and anti-Semitic behaviour in later life.

Answer: Felix Klein

A Klein bottle, in topology, is a paradoxical type of surface that has only one side, but no consistent meaning of "clockwise" or "anticlockwise". A person stood on a Klein bottle surface could walk around it and return to their starting point upside down. Though it can be approximately depicted in three-dimensional space, by allowing the object to intersect with itself where the "handle" meets the "bottle", it is more cleanly represented as a four-dimensional object.

Felix Klein first described the bottle, with reference to another paradoxical surface called a Möbius strip, but his other work spanned many areas of mathematics, including geometry, analysis, abstract algebra and mathematical physics.

Answer: David Hilbert

Hilbert spaces are a type of vector space widely studied at university courses in mathematics, physics and engineering, and particularly useful in fluid dynamics, quantum dynamics, signal processing (electronics involving audio/images) and thermodynamics.

At the turn of the 20th century, David Hilbert collected the 23 problems he considered most important in mathematics. Most problems have now been resolved, many with answers that would have surprised Hilbert, while unresolved problems like the Riemann hypothesis are some of the most important open problems in modern mathematics.

David Blaine is an American illusionist, David Graeber was an American anthropologist and left-wing political activist, and David Wallace-Wells is an American journalist.

Answer: November Revolution

The November Revolution of 1918 began, unsurprisingly, in November 1918, and continued until August 1919. Its resolution led to the Weimar Republic. Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had been serving since 1888 and throughout the First World War, abdicated the country, and the German monarchy was abolished. The mostly left-wing revolutionaries, allied with Soviet Russia, were a mixture of liberals and socialists, and as such supported women's rights.

Emmy Noether stood a standard habilitation exam for tenure eligibility, but following its success she was granted only an untenured and unpaid "extraordinary" professorship, due to her gender. However, a year later, she received her first paid position, as an abstract algebra academic.

Answer: Ring

A ring contains objects of some form that can be added and multiplied, and each object has an "inverse" object that produces 0 when they are added together. For instance, the additive inverse of 3 is -3, and the additive inverse of the polynomial x^2 is -x^2. Rings can also be made from other mathematical objects like sets and matrices.

Emmy Noether made contributions to the recently developing theory of rings, defining one of the most key concepts: ideals. She has a type of ring - a Noetherian ring - named after her, as well as many similar objects in abstract algebra.

Answer: Bolsheviks

In an increasingly far-right and anti-Semitic Germany, Emmy's political beliefs, combined with her Jewish heritage, led to her eviction from a boarding house at the university. Students there described her as a "Marxist-leaning Jewish".

Though personally interested in left-wing politics, Emmy put her views to one side during her teaching. At a later date, even when one of her students arrived in a Nazi SA uniform, she made no comment and continued talking about mathematics uninterrupted.

Answer: Seven Sisters

The colleges that comprise the Seven Sisters, along with Bryn Mawr, are: Barnard, Mount Holyoke, Radcliffe, Smith, Vassar, Wellesley.

Emmy's dismissal followed legislation that led to the firing of all Jewish academics in Germany, and as such many recruitment programs of varying levels of formality sprung up to accommodate them. Emmy chose between Bryn Mawr in America and Somerville College, Oxford in the United Kingdom.

Answer: Ovary

Emmy died on April 14, 1935. Her contributions to mathematics had often been attributed to colleagues, such as those who were on paper in charge of the courses she taught, who presented her results at conferences, or whom she taught. Nonetheless, prominent mathematicians and physicists of the day publicly mourned her death, with Albert Einstein writing to the New York Times that she was the "most significant creative mathematical genius" to be a woman.